Carlo gave her a passionate glance over it. As it had enlarged, so had his heart and his understanding; he saw his enemy beautiful, triumphant—a Queen of Song. He was conquered and her slave.
“Never mind my nose,” he said generously. “I am beaten, fairly beaten, and with my own weapons. You are a clever woman, Signora, and a great singer. Permit me to take your hand.”
“There,” she said, and gave it. “And you, Signor, are a magnificent artist, though I have sometimes thought you a stupid man. What is it but stupidity—Dio!” she cried, “to be jealous of a woman of whom one is not even the lover or the husband?”
“Give me the right to be jealous,” said Carlo the tenor. “Make me one and the other! Marry me, Emilia. I adore you!”
An atmosphere of snuff and mildew enveloped them, as the Maestro, the date and design of whose evening dress-suit baffled the antiquarian and enraptured the caricaturist, embraced both the tenor and the soprano in rapid succession.
“Aha! Mes enfants, am I not a true prophet?” he cried. “Hasten to grow up, I said to the little one ten years ago, and Carlo there shall one day sing Romeo to thy Juliet.” He embraced them again. “You sing like angels—you quarrel like devils! Heaven intended you for one another. Be happy!” And the Maestro blessed the betrothed lovers with a sprinkling of snuff.
THE TUG OF WAR
Men invariably termed her “a sweet woman.” Women called her other things.
What was she like? Of middle height and “caressable,” with a rounded, supple figure, exquisitely groomed and got up! Her golden hair would have been merely brown, if left to Nature. It came nearly to her eyebrows in the dearest little rings, and was coaxed into the loveliest of coils and waves and undulations. Her eyes were lustrous hazel, her eyelashes and eyebrows as nearly black as perfect taste allowed. Her cheeks were of an ivory pallor, sometimes relieved with a faint sea-shell bloom. Her features were beautifully cut, inclining to the aquiline in outline. Her voice was low and tender, especially when she was saying the sort of thing that puts a young fellow out of conceit with the girl he is engaged to, and makes the married man wonder why he threw himself away. Why he was such an infuriated ass, by George! as to beg and pray Clara to marry him ten years ago, and buy a new revolver when she said it was esteem she felt for him, not love. Why Fate should ordain just at this particular juncture that he should encounter the one woman, by jingo! the only woman in the world who had ever really understood and sympathized with him! It was Mrs. Osborne’s vocation to make men of all grades, ranks, and ages ask this question. She had followed her chosen path in life with enthusiasm, let us say, collecting scalps, with here and there a little shudder of pity, and here and there a little smart of pain. Fascination, exercised almost involuntarily, was to her, as to the cobra, the means of life. Not in a vulgar sense, because the late Colonel Osborne had left his widow handsomely provided for. But the excitement of the sport, the keen delight of capturing new victims—bringing the quarry boldly down in the open, or setting insidious snares, pitfalls, and traps for the silly prey to blunder into—these joys the huntress knows who sharpens her arrows and weaves her webs for Man.
I have said—or hinted—that other women did not love Mrs. Osborne. Knowing, as they did, that the lovely widow frankly despised them, her own sex responded by openly declaring war. They knew her strength, and never attacked her save in bands. Yet, strange to say, the invincible Mrs. Osborne was never so nearly worsted as in a single-handed combat to which she was challenged by a mere neophyte—“a chit”—as, had she lived in the eighteenth instead of the twentieth century, the fair widow would have termed Polly Overshott.