THE DANGEROUS INHERITANCE

THE DANGEROUS
INHERITANCE

OR

The Mystery of the Tittani Rubies

BY
IZOLA FORRESTER

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1920

COPYRIGHT, 1919 AND 1920, BY THE NEW IDEA PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY IZOLA FORRESTER PAGE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

THE DANGEROUS INHERITANCE

THE
DANGEROUS INHERITANCE

CHAPTER I

The town studio of Signor Jacobelli faced the west. It was situated on the top floor of an old eight-storied building in the West Fifties. Thirty years ago this had been given over entirely to studios, but now it was broken up into a more profitable mêlée of semi-commercial establishments and light-housekeeping apartments.

The signor, having no doubt the Old-World propensity for permanency, had maintained his studio here for over twenty years, without regard for the changing conditions around him, if indeed he were even conscious of them. His own immediate outlook and environment had remained the same. The view to the west and south from the deep, double-sized windows had varied little, and held a perpetual fascination for him. Thin red chimneys in neighborly groupings on adjacent roofs assumed delicate color values of amethyst and quivering saffrons from Jersey sunsets that turned even the old buildings down towards the riverfront into mystical genii palaces in the early twilight.

Dust lay unnoted upon bookshelves and music-racks about the large, friendly room. The Turkish rug that covered its floor had long since lost all outline of pattern and was as exquisite a blur as the rose-flushed sea mist that hung over the lower end of the island city.

Carlota stood in a window recess, her back to the signor and his unexpected guest, her fingers tying and untying the faded purple silk cord of the shade. From where he sat in the old winged armchair by the piano, Ward caught a perfect silhouette of her profile against the glow of western light. Listening to Jacobelli’s fiery protest in his usual silent way, his mind dwelt upon the blossoming of this foreign flower of girlhood who had so strangely attracted him from the first time he had ever looked into her eyes.

The Marchese Veracci had called him up from the Italian Club two years before, and had besought his good offices for the granddaughter of Margherita Paoli. The following evening they had called on him by appointment. He half closed his eyes, recalling the picture of the girl as he had first seen her. They awaited him in the Florentine room. Even then she had not thought of him, but had stood before a painting of Sorrento, a view through the ravine looking seaward, one hand laid on her breast, her eyes filled with the yearning of youth’s loneliness. She had met him silently, her hand cold as it rested an instant in his palm.

And the old Marchese had pleaded her cause with fervent eloquence.

“I have Jacobelli’s word on her voice,” he said. “What more would you? If you but speak Guido Jacobelli’s name to any European director, he bows to the old maestro’s dictum.”

“He has retired,” Ward returned.

“Retired, yes, from the money mart.” The Marchese had beamed upon the great international banker almost tolerantly. “You cannot comprehend his attitude. No amount of money could tempt him to teach the tyro, the climber, but he has heard Carlota. He knew Paoli well in Italy. It was her influence and friendship which first brought him fame and power. Now he has said that her voice lives again in the child, but there must be at least four years of incessant application and training. To keep her voice divine, she must never be troubled by material cares. She must have an abundance of everything that she needs that her whole nature may relax and expand to give her the freedom to devote her whole life to her career.”

Ward had understood. He knew Guido Jacobelli. While the old maestro was a high priest of art, his price for teaching genius was in proportion to his faith. It had been Carlota’s own attitude of indifference which had dominated his decision. While the Marchese had argued and pleaded for her future, and Maria Roma, her guardian, had hung upon the final word from Ward’s lips, she had listened gravely, her attention wandering constantly to the rare art treasures of the room. Once she had met his eyes as he asked her a direct question.

“You are very young to study seriously. Do you realize the sacrifices you must make?”

“I have always studied to be a singer, signor,” Carlota had told him, her eyes even then disconcerting in their wide intensity. “There are no sacrifices when you love your vocation.”

Ward had smiled back at the Marchese, quoting lightly,

“I did renounce the world, its pride and greed

... at eight years old.”

“My dear,” he added, “one of your own countrymen has spoken so, Fra Lippo Lippi. No parallel, though, eh, Veracci? Here we have the consecration of genius. I will advance fifty thousand. Is it enough?”

Carlota had met his appraising eyes with the aloof resentment of an influence that disturbed her.

“Speak, cara mia,” Maria Roma had cried, tears streaming down her plump cheeks, as she clasped her arms enthusiastically around her charge. “Have you no word of thanks?”

And Ward had never forgotten the flash of challenge in the girl’s dark eyes as she had given him her hand.

“I will succeed and pay you back, signor,” she had said. He might have been merely a money-lender to a princess of the de’ Medici.

He had made only one stipulation and that half in jest, though Maria and the Marchese had agreed most earnestly. She was not to marry nor become entangled in love affairs during the period of her tuition. The concession had completely escaped Carlota’s attention. She had wandered by them out into the wide corridor, stifled by the somber silence of the great closed rooms. Not a single fountain falling in the distance, not a living flower anywhere, nothing but age-old treasures in a palatial, modern museum. He had not spoken to her again, only she had heard his last words to Jacobelli.

“May the fruit fulfill the promise. I will come to see you now and then.”

Through the two years of study he had kept his word. Every few months, unawares, he would come to the old studio and sit for a while, listening to Jacobelli and watching his pupil. Even while he never spoke a word of direct intent to her, Carlota felt a vague uneasiness in his presence, under the steady power of his gaze. He carried with him the impression of a compelling, dominant masterfulness, all the more irresistible through its silence and tireless patience. He was in the late thirties at this time, tall and heavy-set, his head, with its thick, close-cut blond hair, thrust forward from a habit of silent intentness. There was the strongest suggestion of the leonine about him. Once, when she was a child, Carlota remembered being taken to see a captive Algerian lion that had just been brought across for the royal zoo. With a city mob surging forward to stare at him, the lion had lain with an imperial languor and indifference, gazing with unblinking eyes beyond the crowd and the city, seeing only the desert that held his whole life’s desire. Sometimes, in the studio, during one of Ward’s visits, she would catch his eyes fixed upon her, while Jacobelli flamed out into some argument or dissertation, and she would shrink from the purpose that lay behind their patience.

To-day the voice of Jacobelli filled the studio, and Carlota’s delicate dark brows contracted sharply as she listened.

“What more can I do? I have given her all that I know of technique and harmony, and still her voice lacks that emotional quality which the greatest alone possess. The divine voice must have dramatic feeling, intensity. It must lose itself in the grandest passion of emotion. The child tries, but what would you? She does not understand the lack in her own nature. Her woman soul yet slumbers.”

Ward glanced at him with amused, quizzical eyes.

“Let it sleep, Jacobelli. Remember Paoli when she let love conquer her.”

For the moment the old maestro forgot the figure behind the window curtain. With arms thrown upward he turned on the banker.

“You know not anything about Paoli! I, Jacobelli, tell you that! You cannot speak of her with any understanding. She was a law to herself in her own generation. Few women can be that. But I, who know what lay behind the wall of Tittani, say to you I would rather this child lay dead now, with no fulfillment in her life, than that she should know the agony and failure as an artiste that her grandmother did when she sacrificed her whole womanhood—for what? Love, pouf!”

“Can a woman’s nature reach its ripest fulfillment without love?” Ward’s tone was lowered. “History proves that the greatest geniuses have been those who suffered most.”

“But not the singer, signor.” Jacobelli paused in his march up and down the studio. “The singer is something different. It is instinctive. I have heard the most marvelous impassioned voices pour from the most commonplace peasant types. I have heard the greatest tenor of all times tear the emotions of thousands to pieces, and step into his dressing-room to rail at his wife for not providing his favorite dish for him after the opera, ravioli and lampreys. The most superb lyric voice of to-day comes from a little, stout contadina who picked up centimes around the flower-market in Naples when I was young. Do you think she acquired divinity of soul and utterance from some supreme emotion? Ridiculous. She is a gourmand, a virago, absolutely bourgeois, yet she sings like a seraph. Why, then, is it not in Carlota’s voice?”

Ward rose leisurely. The old silken curtains hung motionless. The shadows were heavy in the corners of the studio.

“She is a higher type,” he said in a low voice. “When you agree with me, bring her to me.”

CHAPTER II

After Ward had gone the old Italian maestro seated himself at the piano, improvising as he always did when he was disturbed. It was an enormous old ebony instrument, mellow and vibrant in its response to his touch. He did not even look up as Carlota leaned her elbows upon a pile of dusty folios, watching him anxiously. Finally she drew a quick, impatient breath.

“I wish he would never come here again.”

“It is customary,” Jacobelli shrugged his expansive shoulders. “You are too sensitive, my dear. It is you who are conferring a favor in permitting this person to provide the means for your education. You will return to him, in the hour of your triumph, every penny it has been his privilege to advance at this time.”

“Why does he come here and sit looking at me in such a way? In the courtyard at home there were little lizards that came out early in the morning, gray and cold, with eyes like his, green in the light. I was always afraid of putting my hand on one of them around the fountain.”

Jacobelli struck a minor chord, avoiding her eyes.

“Because he is a man, and you are growing beautiful. You will become accustomed to this sort of thing. All men will love you, or seem to. It is the compliment paid to women who are great artistes. Your grandmother was adored in her day. Kings and princes knelt at her shrine, and fought for her favor. Even I was infatuated with her. You must learn to smile impersonally and receive homage.”

“Then it is not—love?” Carlota asked doubtfully. “I heard what you said to him about her. Why did you say that, about her suffering and sacrifice? I never remember her like that. She was wonderful. She seemed to give out radiance and warmth like the sunlight. Wasn’t she happy?”

Jacobelli’s hands were flung up suddenly, and he laughed at her.

“My dear, who may say when a woman is happy or when she is not. Sometimes they find their greatest happiness in their most supreme suffering. She was divine, that is enough. As for love, Carlotina mia, it is merely Life’s plaything. It is the toy we give to youth, but never, never to genius. The rabble amuses itself with what it calls love. But genius is sufficient unto itself. It is the celestial fire. It does not seek a mortal torch upon its altar.”

“You said you would rather see me dead—” began Carlota slowly, when the little electric bell at the outer door rang lightly, announcing Maria Roma at her customary hour of five. As always, she followed it by half opening the door, peering around with an arch, reconnoitering glance.

“Do I intrude?” she asked, with her beaming smile, and entered impressively, always with the dramatic action as if the orchestra had sounded her motif. She shook one forefinger impressively at Carlota. “You loiter and take up the maestro’s time, gossip and loiter when you should be studying.”

But Jacobelli waved aside the admonition with one ample movement of his large, plump hand. As Carlota went to the inner room for her cloak and hat, he spoke in an undertone.

“Ward is becoming very much interested in her. She treats him with indifference. You must teach her diplomacy. She has too much arrogance of youth, and absolutely no gratitude for what he is doing for her.”

Maria’s brilliant dark eyes narrowed with comprehensive amusement.

“You ask the impossible, Guido. I who have known all three, Margherita, Bianca, and this glorious child, tell you the truth, and you will remember what I say. You can no more teach the heart of a Paoli to keep its temperament within bounds than you can yoke the thunder-clouds and lightning that sweep down over our Trentino.”

“And the responsibility is ours,” said Jacobelli, with a deep exhalation of his cigarette. “Given this nature, we are to keep her a prisoner behind the wall of Tittani, eh?”

Maria sank deeply into the velvet-cushioned chair beside him, and the two smiled at each other reminiscently.

“It was a high wall,” she sighed at length. “I remember your last visit there, Guido, before the child was born, five years I think it was. Bianca was a flower then. Such flaming hair and dark eyes, the true Florentine type. She was more like Tittani in her looks. Carlota is a throwback to the grandmother. Ah, my Guido, was there ever a woman like her? Even at the last, before he died, when her heart was torn with agony of renunciation—”

“She lost her voice,” Jacobelli spoke with finality. “Yet Ward would tell me love is the great fulfillment. Did she ever sing again? No. She buried her art with her love in the grave of her poet after he had denied her to the world. You and I, Maria Roma, who know of this, must protect this child against the traitor in her own nature.”

Maria sighed doubtfully. She was the large, vivid type of the Italian peasant, richly developed by success and circumstance. Years before, Sforza, director of La Scala, had journeyed with friends to a mountain section of the Trentino. In the purple twilight a voice had drifted down to them from a band of vintage workers, homeward bound. It was Maria Roma at eighteen, a buoyant, deep-breasted bacchante, her black hair hanging in thick clusters of curls around her radiant face.

Enrico Sforza had loved her, more perhaps for her ardent faithfulness and responsiveness. She had achieved a sensation in contralto rôles and he had interested La Paoli in his peasant love. In middle age, after his death, Maria had retired to live at the Villa Tittani with the old diva. Here she had shared with her in the tragedy of her final years. Fifty years before, the story of Margherita Paoli and her love for John Tennant, the English poet, had been part of the romance of Italy. Her beauty and genius had opened every door of success to her. Even on the threshold of womanhood she had been given all that ambition could demand from life, and turning in the highest hour of her triumphs, she had forsaken the world for a year, giving the full gift of her love to Tennant.

Suddenly she had returned, restless and hungering for her art. As Maria knew, Tennant had been jealous of her voice and the life which he could not share, had demanded that she give up her career for the sake of their love, and return with him to England. And she had laughed at him. Love could not bring full completeness and happiness to a woman of genius, she had said. It could not satisfy her for the loss of the divine fire. Tennant had left Italy, and five years later she married Count Tittani. Bianca, the mother of Carlota, had been born at the old villa overlooking the Campagna. She had spent her childhood here, and in the convent of Maria Pietà at the head of the ancient ilex avenue leading up from Mondragone. Tittani had died when she was nine, leaving La Paoli the prestige of his name and wealth combined with her own full measure of maturity in her art.

It was at this time that Maria had come nearest to her confidence. Word came from England to them that Tennant had been stricken blind, and in the midst of a gala performance of “Traviata,” La Paoli had left all and gone to him. He had refused to see her when she reached London. Bertrand Wallace, his closest friend, had told her simply enough that he was without means, that he longed to go to Italy where “he might feel the sun on his face,” and she had entered into the splendid conspiracy that glorified the end of her life.

The Villa Tittani faced the Campagna with a lofty, blank wall. Beyond it stretched terraced gardens, winding alleys of cypress and ilexes, a place of enchantment, with the never-ending music of falling waters in the distance, of hidden fountains in grottoes, and cascades that fell over ancient steps in ripples of silver. Yet all its beauty was dominated by its wall, blank on one side, terraced on the garden side into long, steep depths of mystery, of infinite green vistas that lost their way in the cypress gloom of the lower distances.

Here Wallace brought his friend, the blind poet, to the little house near the end of the wall where the view opened seaward. Two old servants of the Tittani had cared for him until his passing, and here La Paoli could come and watch him from a distance, unseen or suspected in the largesse of her love by the man whose faith she had betrayed for fame. It was characteristic of her that even in her grief and isolation from him, she seemed to find a supreme, almost fierce, satisfaction in the tragic immolation of her own happiness for his sake. He had died finally, unconscious, on her breast, and she had never sung again.

“You see, Maria, I have proved the truth of it in my own heart’s blood,” she had said, “A woman cannot serve two gods. If Bianca has my voice, help me to teach her this: no man is content with half of a woman’s love or nature. If she desires to attain to the highest art, she must sacrifice love.”

Within six months after she had left the shelter of the convent Bianca had married Peppino Trelango, son of a dead patriot. The Contessa had cared for him through his boyhood, because she had heard him playing on his violin once on the old quay at Pontecova where centuries before the body of the boy count, Giovanni Borgia, had borne witness against his brother in the dawn. When Bianca came home, she had met him in the old gardens, a boy of nineteen, like one of the marble fauns come to life to teach her youth’s heritage. When the Contessa returned from a trip to her favorite midsummer retreat at Isola Bella, she had found the two gone, and Maria desolate with despair.

It was from this romance that Carlota had been born. After the death of Peppino in an Algerian skirmish, Bianca had returned to the villa behind the old rose-colored wall with her child. She had lived in the gardens with the memories of her love, a silent, smiling, stately girl who baffled the vivid, emotional La Paoli by the elusive sensitiveness of her nature.

“She is the wraith of my passion for the love I denied,” the Contessa would declare. “I starved for him, and trampled the desire with my pride while I bore her to Tittani. She is the very spirit of renunciation, Maria, and she will drive me to madness with her silence and resignation. Carlota is not like her. She is a flame, a beautiful rosebud, all light and movement. She is like I was, God keep her.”

Carlota was four when they bore her mother down to the old tomb of the Tittani. She could remember her voice at night when she bent over her to kiss her, and the fall of her long, soft hair over her face. Sometimes in their walks through the gardens, in the quiet years of her girlhood, she would come to the old tomb set into the hillside, its iron gates overgrown with vines, and she would lean her cheek against them. Assunta, her nurse, would scold her for not keeping her thoughts on the spiritual.

“Ah, a little that was my mother lies here,” Carlota would answer. “I may love it, Assunta, without sinning, may I not, just her beautiful hair even?”

After Italy entered the war, the villa had been turned into a hospital, and the fortune of the Contessa laid at the feet of “La Patria.”

“Still, there is some left,” she had told Maria at the time of her own departure. Strong in spirit and dominant, she had ruled to the end, planning and directing Carlota’s future. “I have given the child a heritage and training that are priceless. If you have to, sell the jewels in the cinque cento chest. They are for her. I have not even looked at them since he died. Take her to America, Maria. Find there Guido Jacobelli. He was a boy when I made my début, before your time, the gala performance of ‘Rigoletto.’ I was a wonderful Gilda, Maria. Later I gave him his first start. He is not one who forgets. You will go to him in New York and he will find you a patron. I have written to the Marchese Veracci to expect you and see that you are lodged fittingly. No economy. Surround her with beauty and comfort while she studies, but keep her from love until she has won success. Her mother sacrificed all for Peppino’s kiss. If I were able I would keep her here behind the wall of Tittani and never let her see the face of a man whom she might love. Dust and ashes all, Maria. The greatest and most enduring is the memory of a lost love.”

After the closing of the old villa, Carlota and Signora Roma had come to New York. Maria had been prodigal in her expenditures. She had taken an expensive studio and had lavished the tenderest care on her charge.

“The art quarters of Europe, cara mia,” she would say to her airily when Carlota protested, “have been filled for generations with what?—failures. Boy and girl aspirants, pitiful little garret Pierrots and Columbines, starving upon hopes that never materialized. Art is greedy. It demands all of your nerve, force and vitality. To come out of the training of the next four years a victor, you must pamper yourself. Dress well, eat well, feed your love of beauty as well as your stomach. Remember, ‘white hyacinths for the soul as well as bread for the body.’ You will be a slave to your art, and must keep the fires burning.”

“But you will use up all we have,” Carlota had protested.

“What then?” Maria had demanded proudly. “You have only a small fortune left. You must have thousands, tens of thousands before you bow to your first night’s audience.”

They had met the old Marchese Veracci the first week of their arrival. Few there were in the Washington Square section of the city who were not familiar with the stately Old-World figure of the Marchese. He was as welcome in the crowded Sicilian quarter below Fourth Street as in the corridors of the Brevoort or Lafayette. He held his court daily at the fountain in the center of the Square. Always with a fresh boutonnière and a smile and courtly word for every dark-eyed child who laughed back at him. Sometimes, when he strolled past the bust of Garibaldi, he would leave a little spray of flowers on the pedestal. After dinner he never failed to stroll out into the twilight and lift his soul in salute to the cross of light that gleamed on the memorial tower above the trees.

“It is the one spot in the whole city,” he told them, “that holds the Old-World glamour and charm, yet I would not have you and Carlota living down here. The lines of demarcation are too blurred between the workers and the dreamers. Then, too, there are the dancing shapes that come to stare and ridicule. There is a contagion of play here that breaks the concentration you must put into your study, my child. Keep away from it at this period. Later, I could wish you nothing better than to share in the spirit of comradeship in art and beauty, yes, and most of all, in humanity. That you will find down here, no matter how others try to detract from the atmosphere, like the very small boys who will ever toss pebbles at the stained-glass windows of the saints.”

Maria Roma had agreed fervently to anything he said. His delighted enthusiasm satisfied her that the old Contessa had chosen rightly in making him joint guardian with her over Carlota. Guido Jacobelli had retired, he had told her over their first luncheon en tête-à-tête at the Italian Club. Money would never tempt him to teach. Nothing but brilliant genius in a pupil could ever lure him from his retreat to give them the full benefit of his years of experience and study.

“I know him well, and of them all he is still the wizard, the maestro. Even now, his word on a voice would open the gates of opportunity to any singer. Casanova, of the Opera here, bows to his dictum. If it were anybody but Margherita Paoli who calls to me, I would say no, but as it is, ma bella, we will go. Two places I know where we may find him, at his old studio in town and his country home at Arrochar, on Staten Island. We will go there.”

The visit had proven Carlota’s crucial hour. Maria had hovered over her excitedly, feeling that upon the great old maestro’s verdict lay the entire future fate of her career. The Marchese had called for them and had accompanied them out to Jacobelli’s home. It was typical of his simplicity and love of nature. On the wooded heights above Kill von Kull at Arrochar, lay a small colony of Italian artists and musicians. Their homes were like miniature villas perched above a smaller bay of Naples when the myriad lights gleamed on the shipping and distant Jersey hills.

As they walked up the quiet hill street from the station, Carlota’s dark eyes had sparkled with memories. Surely in this perfect fall day, with the vivid blue of a cloudless sky above the deep crimson and gold of autumn foliage, there was a semblance of the Villa Tittani’s beauty. A rock wall covered with brilliant red creeper vines surrounded the garden. It seemed neglected, with shrubbery straggling in groups, unclipped and straying. The stone flower urns were overgrown with rank, clambering vines. In the southeast corner a dancing faun poised with wary, pointed ears, as if listening seaward. When the Marchese tried to open the outer vestibule door of the enclosed veranda, two stately Italian greyhounds rose leisurely and eyed the callers questioningly.

Within they had found Jacobelli living alone with his memories. Carlota never forgot the picture that he made, welcoming them into his wide, sunlit studio. Swarthy, stout, curly-haired, frowning at her from heavy eyebrows, he had seemed to gauge and grasp her whole capabilities in one swift, cursory glance. She had been caressed and encouraged all of her life, but now, for the first time, she felt her confidence shaken as she waited by the piano, facing the piercing eyes and uncompromising glare of the old maestro. Never once, during the two years of study under him that followed that first visit, had she shaken off that first impression. Eccentric, proud, profoundly conscious of his power to make or unmake queens of the operatic world, he had been a revelation to her from that day.

The Marchese had pleaded for her eloquently, showing the letter he had received from La Paoli a few weeks before her death. Jacobelli had listened to it in silence, staring fixedly at the girl. She was very like her grandmother in appearance, he thought. Behind her stood a towering old terra-cotta jar filled with scarlet autumn leaves. She looked out at the sea view, her eyes filled with a dreaming longing. Her hair was heavy and lustrous, growing back from a low, broad forehead with the shell-like outline one sees in the portraits of Beatrice or one of Del Sarto’s girl saints. Her eyes were long and shadowy, heavy-lidded, aloof. When she was interested or startled, they opened widely, a deep, warm brown color, their darkness made more vivid by the rare rose red of her lips and the peculiar jasmine clearness of her skin. But it was something beyond mere beauty and grace that arrested Jacobelli’s interest. There was a sense of suppressed vitality about her, the insistent promise of the unusual, of some compelling magnetism that lay behind her silence and repression. Suddenly he seated himself at the long bench, and struck a chord for her pitch.

“Sing,” he ordered. “First, a long scale.”

Carlota had hesitated, looking to Maria for sympathy. Might she not sing, for this supreme trial, some famous aria? But Signora Roma had raised both hands in hushed rebuke. They were before the final tribunal. The outcome was on the knees of the gods. But as the full, vibrant soprano rose to the scale, Jacobelli struck a crashing chord and leapt from the bench, clasping his arms about the slim figure at his side.

“Ah, Sanctissima Maria, it is there!” he shouted. “It is the voice of Paoli come to life once more! My beautiful, my marvel, ah, what we will not make of you! Sing, cara mia, sing again for me. No, so!”

For over an hour Carlota sang for him, while Maria sat by the deep bay window, weeping from sheer happiness, and the old Marchese strolled to and fro, stroking the greyhounds, and smoking incessantly, keeping time as he smiled at the success of his experiment.

The fruition of that first visit had come richly in the two years that followed it. Carlota was eighteen now, with not alone the years of her grandmother’s careful teaching, but Jacobelli’s unceasing discipline and watchfulness as her voice ripened and developed. One year more and she would be ready for her début, he said. It was this final year she dreaded, with Ward’s visits to the studio becoming more frequent and his interest in her losing its cloak of patronage.

She was silent on this day, almost during the entire homeward walk across the Park. Their apartment had been Maria’s choice, selected against the better judgment of even the Marchese. He had advised a smaller, less expensive suite farther uptown, but in a conservative section. Maria had cast the suggestion from her scornfully. For the struggling student any environment was of secondary consideration, but for the sole pupil of Guido Jacobelli, the protégée of Ogden Ward, there must be a gilded cage. Between Fifth Avenue and Madison in the upper Sixties she had found one that suited her, a spacious apartment that in its richness of tone satisfied her. It might have been from the Villa Tittani itself, by the time Maria had finished its decoration.

“You had worried the maestro to-day,” she said severely, as they approached the heavy bronze and crystal entrance. “He could not even improvise. We are giving our whole hearts and souls to you for your success, and you are not grateful.”

Carlota turned her head and smiled at her tenderly. She was used to the scoldings of the old prima donna.

“I am grateful to you, tanta mia,” she said, slipping her hand under the other’s arm. “But I sometimes think I hate Mr. Ward. When I hear his footstep I cannot sing any more, and when he sits there and looks at me I could jump from the window. I hate his eyes and his voice and everything about him.”

Maria’s dark eyebrows arched in amazement. She glanced with quick suspicion at the girl’s troubled face.

“But you have no reason—have you?”

Carlota’s eyes narrowed with amusement at her anxiety. As they entered the lower hall, she stripped off her long gray suède gloves impatiently. The lights were not switched on yet, and she let one fall near the outer steps. It lay, a part of the twilight, unnoticed by either herself or Maria, but one who came behind them picked it up. It was a mere fleeting impression she caught of him. Maria had stepped into the elevator when he reached her side to return it, a curious, poster-like figure, with the uncertain light accentuating his foreign features and half-closed, seeking eyes.

“Yes, it is mine, thank you,” she said gravely, and carried with her upstairs an impression of restless, suppressed dissent and discontent combined with a haunting fragrance of a new cigarette smoke. When she reached the apartment, while Maria hurried to make Russian tea for them, she stood by the window, looking down over the boxes of green. Across the street in the mother-of-pearl gloom, she could see the glow of the cigarette where the boy stood, waiting for something, and it held her with almost a premonition of menace.

CHAPTER III

Over the tea she was unusually silent, while Maria, ensconced at last on her favorite chaise longue, mellowed under the warmth. Carlota’s voice, cool with daring, broke in on her relaxation.

“Maria, when will you treat me as a woman?”

Maria’s face flushed as she spilled the tea blindly on the rug.

“You are in love?” she gasped. “Never would you have thought of such a thing if you were not in love.”

“Oh, you poor, old preciosa!” Carlota laughed richly, folding her arms around the signora’s ample shoulders. “I wouldn’t know love if I met him face to face this minute in your teacup. But I want to know so much, Maria. I want to ask you about so many things. You love me, do you not? Enough to tell me anything at all I ask you?”

“Ah, do I not,” sighed Maria uneasily. “Is it about Mr. Ward?”

Carlota drew up a low footstool of rose silk and ivory carving, and laid her glossy head close to the one on the pillows.

“I have said I hate him,” she replied composedly. “Let us forget that I ever have to see him again. I want you to listen and love me more than you ever have so you will answer me truthfully. Why did Signor Jacobelli tell Mr. Ward to-day that my grandmother sacrificed her whole womanhood and that he would rather see me dead than have me like her. What was behind the wall of Tittani that I never knew about?”

“He is a pompous old egoist,” Maria answered with amazing composure considering the tumult in her mind. “You remember her? Did she not live like a queen with her court even at her age? She was the most regal person I ever knew. You can remember the life at the villa? Was it somber or full of unhappiness? She was the Contessa Tittani. She had everything she wanted. Some day when you have gained all that she did, we will go back to the old villa, and spend our summers there. Remember your goats, beloved, the little Nini and Cherubini—”

“They will be gone when we get back,” Carlota said slowly. “You have lied to me as you always do, Maria, with love. I will tell you things I remember that you do not know I know. I can remember my mother. She was very white, with eyes like the lower pool in the moonlight, and her hair was so soft and so long. I felt it always over my face in the darkness when she bent to kiss me good-night. I have dreamt I felt it since, and wakened reaching for her. You know Assunta?”

Maria murmured an inarticulate, doubtful injunction to Assunta’s attendant dæmon, and made horns with her finger-tips with a subconscious reversion to the old superstition of the Trentino fireside tales.

“She had a rattling tongue. What has she told you?”

“It was about the wall.” Carlota clasped her hands around her knees, and looked before her seeing the way of the old villa and the beauty of it. “It was so high to me in those days. I have looked up at it, Maria, until it seemed as if its highest terrace met the sky.”

“There were seven, built by Giovanni Fontana.”

“I loved them. The stone was so old and rose-colored with green and violet streaking it. On the side towards the road it was so bare and forbidding, and on our side it was all beauty and lavishness as if it could not give us too much, of its bounty. There was no entrance, you remember, Maria, there by the road, and I used to follow the wall around the garden trying to see how you ever went out through it. And Assunta told me, I suppose to keep me satisfied, that no one had ever found the way over the wall excepting my mother—”

“Ah, the blind, cackling pullet. If I had known—” Maria nodded her head with relish. “She was selling melons in Mondragone when your mother lived.”

“And when I asked her how my mother ever climbed the wall”—Carlota’s eyes closed and opened again with dreamy ecstasy—“she told me she escaped with the wings of love. After that—don’t scold, dear, I love to talk to you about it, and there is no one else now—after that I loved the wall better than all the gardens and the fountains and the grottoes even. Won’t you tell me what Jacobelli meant, now? What meaning did he put into it all, the wall and the unhappiness of my grandmother and the tragedy of it all?”

Maria Roma was silent for some time. Slowly she reached for a cigarette and lighted it, drawing deeply on it as she stared upward at the ceiling.

“I have waited for this,” she said finally, with a sigh of resignation. “Some day I knew you would ask me, and out of all the world, I would rather tell you, because I will discriminate between what you should know and what is best buried in that old garden tomb. Wait.” She pushed away Carlota’s reaching arms. “See what I have saved for you out of the past.”

Impulsively she rose and crossed to the end of the studio. Hidden here behind old strips of tapestry and mediæval embroidery were old locked chests which had been brought from Italy with all the care the dower treasures of a princess might have commanded. Carlota had never even guessed at their contents. If she had given the matter a thought at all, she had believed them filled with little household keepsakes, linen, silver, bric-à-brac which Maria had managed to save for her.

Now she stood in amazement as the old singer lifted out costume after costume from the chests, stage raiment and festive gowns of thirty and forty years before. From carved and inlaid boxes she drew out gems and decorations that had been lavished on the great diva and laid them before Carlota, forgetting in the pride of the moment the discretion of silence regarding the romance of genius. The girl’s eyes widened with glowing wonder and delight as she fingered the old treasures, listening to Maria’s vivid, picturesque recital of the reign of Margherita Paoli.

“She was taller than you, cara mia, majestic, a queen in carriage and expression. She never wore other hair than her own. It was golden bronze and hung in ripples to her knees. I have woven it in Marguerita’s plaits with these strands of pearls, and coiled it high into Fedora’s crown with this diamond and ruby tiara. The necklace is here, too.” She piled the contents of the cases eagerly until she found it. “Rubies and diamonds. They came from the crown jewels of Roumania, a part of the Constantinople loot centuries ago. The crown prince was exiled to a mountain garrison in the Caucasus for two years after he gave them to her, but he never told where they were. This center ruby in the tiara is from Persia, one of the finest in the world. Some day you shall wear them. They will suit you as they did her. And this—ah, my child, you should have seen her wearing this in ‘Semiramide.’” She lifted out a heavy barbaric stomacher encrusted in rough, uncut jewels. “This was given to her by the Rajah of Kadurstan. He tried to kill himself after the performance one night in Paris when she refused to see him. This necklace of opals and emeralds was from the Grand Duke of Teklahava. It had been part of the Byzantine loot in the days of Ivan the Terrible. Ah, but, Carlota, behold, this was ever about her throat, the medallion hidden in her breast from all eyes. Never will I forget the night when Tennant gave it to her. The king had given a farewell banquet for her. She was decorated and fêted as never any other singer was. And after it was over, I saw the two as they stood out in the moonlit loggia of the palace, and he clasped this about her white throat. His portrait is in the medallion. There is a secret spring—wait—so it opens. Was he not a worthy lover for her?”

Carlota looked long at the pictured face in the old gold and crystal case. It was old-fashioned in style. The hair was worn long and curled back thickly from his forehead. It was the head of an enthusiast, boyish, too, in its eager intensity, passionate, unsatisfied.

“He does not look happy,” she said slowly. “I have never heard his name before. Who was he, Maria?”

Signora slipped from the clouds with a shock of reality and caught the medallion from her hand.

“No one, no one at all. See this ring, one single perfect solitaire surrounded by black pearls, a gift from the Empress of France, my child.”

Carlota rose, staring down at the wealth of jewels with puzzled, hurt pride.

“Why have we accepted money from Mr. Ward to pay for my tuition when we had these to sell?”

The vandalism of the suggestion horrified Maria. She replaced everything with a resolute hand, locking each case from a small bunch of keys suspended from a slender chain on her neck.

“You would market the trophies of your grandmother!” she said haughtily. “America has commercialized you. They belong to the woman you will be. I will give you the keys at your début.”

“I don’t care so very much for them. They are beautiful, but, after all, they are only things you buy. I asked you for something richer.” She laid her arms coaxingly about Maria’s throat. “Was my mother happy?”

“If love can make any woman happy, she was.” Signora Roma’s voice broke with agitation. “Do not ask me anything further.”

“She was very young to die, was she not, only twenty-two? She was younger than I am now when she first met my father, wasn’t she, Maria?” No answer, but she felt the tears on her own cheek as she pressed it to Maria’s face. “I think I know what it is you will not tell me. With all the jewels and triumphs, my grandmother lost her love, and somehow, my mother found love even though she died so young and was never famous. Is that it?”

Maria suddenly reached her hands upward and framed the face above her in a tremulous caress.

“You have the heritage of rebellion; how can I warn you or teach you to fight it? Your worst enemy, Carlota, is your own heart. Distrust it. It is the traitor to your individuality—your genius, whatever you like to call it.”

Carlota stood erect, laughing suddenly, her arms outstretched widely.

“Listen to this that Assunta told me too,” she said teasingly. “Once, hundreds of years ago, the Villa Tittani was part of an old castle. The wall is all that is left of it, and the old tower above the grottoes. And there was a Princess Fiametta—”

Maria made horns with her finger-tips hastily.

“Assunta was a scandalous waggle-tongue. Had I only guessed that she was stuffing your ears with this sort of gunpowder, I would have known how to finish her forever. I hear the bell.”

It was the Marchese, courtly and whimsical as he glanced shrewdly from one to the other.

“I have come to entreat a favor,” he said happily. “After I have partaken of your most excellent tea, ma bella Maria, I will ask it. I have not the courage yet. How is our little one?”

Carlota’s brows drew together behind his back. She waited in silence, listening while the Marchese brought Maria into a mellow mood with his little buoyant stories and high lights of adventure.

“Ah, but I have seen sights to-day, a whole avenue of traffic held up because a tiny goldfinch escaped from a bird store on Twenty-Third Street. It alighted directly in the car track and shrank there panting and terrified, and in this hard-hearted, prosaic city, not one would drive over it. Is not that a fair sign of the times, my friend? And again, I take the ’bus down the Avenue at dusk for the beauty of the lights in perspective, like magnolia blooms if you but half close your eyes. And yesterday I saw the conductor, a red-cheeked Irish boy, reading a newspaper that had been left on a seat. What you think? The baseball column? The sports? Not at all.” The Marchese chuckled tenderly. “He reads the advice to young mothers. See? It is the brand new bambino somewhere with its finger-tips rose-petaled, holding his heart fast. And a pack of children on Thompson Street fighting—for what? A trampled pink carnation. I would have turned them loose if I could have, in that meadow of oleanders and the orange grove beyond, you remember, Maria, as you come down from Frascati and below the Campagna and the sea. Salute!” He sighed reminiscently, and reached for his teacup. “I am an old romanticist, Carlota. Your youth must be patient with my maunderings of sentiment.”

Maria retired to the kitchenette to prepare fresh tea, and Carlota lighted the candles on the low table by the fire.

“You are happy, yes?” the Marchese asked, regarding her with the pride he took no pains to conceal. “Jacobelli tells me it may only be for one year more, and then, behold! I live for that first night of triumph.”

Carlota sighed impatiently. It was as though the sight of the jewels and story of La Paoli’s life had wakened in her youth’s urge for adventure. She looked up at the fine old face wistfully.

“I am lonely. Tanta keeps me as secluded as if I were in a convent. Surely I am old enough to go out somewhere. Now that summer is over, it seems as if I could not stand another winter. Aren’t they bleak here? Every day when we walk in the Park, I want to turn and run from it all, the stripped trees and caged animals, and Maria and Jacobelli, and everything!” Her finger-tips stretched widely. “I am homesick.”

“No, you are just ennuied, that is all,” said the Marchese soothingly. He pursed his lips until his silver-gray imperial and pointed mustache took on the semblance of a crescent and scimitar. Yet his eyes twinkled down at her understandingly. “Sunday evening I go, as is my custom, to the home of my friend Carrollton Phelps. Many, many interesting people drop in there at that time. It would be a beginning for you, but, mind, I will not have you known for what you are. Not a whisper.”

“Are they all”—Carlota checked herself; not for worlds would she have wounded the debonnair old courtier by even suggesting that he was past the meridian of life—“famous?”

“No, no, no. They are all aspirants,” he corrected. “One must show some signs of having the germ, at least, of genius before the door opens widely, but you will find many who are young like yourself, many. I, myself, will prepare Maria.”

But when the evening came the signora was indisposed, and insisted on Carlota’s remaining with her. The Marchese waved her objections aside tenderly.

“It is most informal and Mrs. Phelps is charming. Here in America, Maria, we adjust the barriers of etiquette to the whim of the moment. I will guard her from anything dangerous, you may be sure.”

They had taken a hansom down the avenue, instead of a taxi. It was the Marchese’s choice.

“I never like to be hurried,” he told her. “I do not like this—what do they call it?—joy of speeding. The aeroplane, yes. I have two boys in the service at home, but not for amusement. I like to take my little moments of outdoor enjoyment leisurely. You will see, my dear, how beautiful this is. I call it my avenue of flower lights.”

The home of the Phelpses was on East Tenth Street, a tall four-storied residence of dark brown stone. Above the low deep French doorway there stretched across the entire second floor a great carved Moorish window of exquisite fretwork which Phelps had transported from an old palace in Seville.

Despite her indisposition Maria had given much thought and anxiety to Carlota’s toilette for the occasion. Finally, she had laid out for her a beautiful old scarf of Point Venise, so yellowed by age that it was the tint of old ivory. It was encrusted with tiny seed pearls, and with it she selected from one of the chests a girdle of gold links, cunningly joined in serpentine fashion with pendent topaz here and there.

“It is a trifle too barbaric,” she had mused, “but yet it suits you. And you shall wear white velvet like Julietta.”

“Oh, no, I will not,” laughed Carlota, kissing her. “You would have me perpetually making my début, tanta.” Accordingly she had chosen her own gown, the hue of an oak autumn leaf, which fell close to her slender young figure in mediæval lines. As she lingered before the mirror before leaving, Carlota smiled back at her reflection almost with a challenge. Back at the villa there was an old painting hanging at a turn in a staircase, where the sunlight would fall full upon it from an oriel window high above. It was the Princess Fiametta, her eyes wearied with the weight of the golden crown that bound her brows, her gown the same tint and style as the one Carlota wore to-night. She turned her girdle sideways so that its line might correspond with that in the painting, and rumpled her hair to make the resemblance more striking.

The old legend Assunta had told her recurred vividly to-night. She had been merely a girl princess, imprisoned in the old garden and towered castle by custom and precedent. And there had been a young fisherman from the village at the foot of the mountain, Peppino, who had come to the Castle. From her tower window she had seen and loved him, and at a fête in the village she had dared to escape over the wall and mingle with the people. Peppino had danced with her, and wooed her, not knowing she was the princess in disguise, and his sweetheart had stabbed her through jealousy. It was the tragedy of youth’s eternal quest after romance and had lost nothing from Assunta’s impassioned telling.

“To-night, maybe,” Carlota told herself, half laughingly, half in earnest, as she looked back in the mirror, “we scale the wall of Tittani.”

CHAPTER IV

They passed up a carven, squarely built staircase to the second floor. The rooms were lofty and spacious. It seemed to Carlota, in the first glance about her, there here prevailed something of the same spirit that had marked her grandmother’s receptions. Little groups gathered intimately in corners, a girl played something of Grieg’s at the grand piano in the far room. Her hair had a golden sheen beneath the lampshade of Chinese embroidery, bronze and yellow.

The Marchese was in his happiest mood, the smiling courtier to his finger-tips. He left her with Mrs. Phelps, a little dark woman with frankly graying hair, but as the other guests came up the staircase, Carlota found herself on a low Moorish stool beside Carrollton Phelps’s chair. He attracted her greatly. During the drive down the Avenue the Marchese had told her his story with unction. It was a favorite tale with him. Phelps had gone abroad in the earliest days of the war, joining the Lafayette Escadrille. Only those who knew him intimately before this happened, could appreciate what his personal gift of service had meant at that time even in the great summing-up of sacrifice that followed later. He had been a very successful artist, painting portraits of celebrities and social leaders. He had always been lavish in entertaining even then, and now, when he returned at thirty-five, a helpless paralytic from his final fall, the most amazing thing had been, as the Marchese expressed it, that “his wings were unbroken.”

To Carlota, even the expression of his face brought a certain sense of encouragement, as if he divined the strangeness that she felt among all these new faces. His dark hair was prematurely whitened like his wife’s, but she liked his lean, virile face, and keen, dark eyes. Even while his friends came and went beside him, he kept her there, asking her questions of her life in Italy.

“The Marchese has told me who you are—a glorious heritage. Mind you keep the pace, but don’t let them starve you.” His thin, strong hands gesticulated eagerly. “I know them. It was the same with me before I went over, success and more success and then—husks. Do you know the greatest thing that came to me from it all? My wife. We were married just before I left, and she went also, down in Serbia, where it was hell, you remember, nursing. I did not see her for four years, then her face came out of a gray cloud in a London hospital and I found the strength to live even to look at her. Don’t let them deceive you, my dear. There is nothing at all in this thing called life but love and ideals. Will you tell that fellow to come here, the one with the violin.”

The man stood by the piano, smiling at something the girl had just said as she turned from the keyboard. He bowed as Carlota gave her message, looked at her with his quizzical, half-closed eyes near-sightedly, and strolled to Phelps’s side. Presently he returned.

“I have to bring you back. He only wanted me to meet you.”

“I have been preaching your song of life,” Phelps said, drawing himself up in his chair with the quick, restless movement that spoke of pain-cramped muscles. “This is the spirit of Serbia and all burdened peoples, Dmitri Kavec. Betty saved his life, and he has retaliated by keeping me in a ferment of enthusiasm over his country in her birth-pangs. He is not as sardonic as he appears. It is a pose.”

Dmitri’s face flushed eagerly, a queer, shy deepening in color like an embarrassed boy.

“I never pose, Miss Trelango. My life is nothing, understand. I drop it overboard anywhere at all, but I had forgotten how to laugh or look at the sun, and Mrs. Phelps has shown it to me again, that is all. For her sake I put up with the abuse from this person here. Do you live down here?”

Carlota shook her head. Some one had taken the place of the girl at the piano, she could not see whom, but at the first low, minor chords, she was aware of a strange thrill of interest. Dmitri leaned back in the winged armchair next to Phelps and closed his eyes.

“Now we have some dream pictures,” he said softly.

Carlota lifted her head eagerly to catch a glimpse of the player. The other men in the studio, even Phelps himself, had all seemed to her like the Marchese and Jacobelli, middle-aged, sophisticated, impervious to romance or sentiment, tired of all emotion. But the boy at the piano was different. He seemed to have forgotten the people around him, and yet he led their fancy where he would with the magic of his melody and tone pictures.

Looking from face to face Carlota saw the spell steal over each. The Marchese smiled with half-closed eyes, living over the joyous indiscretions of his youth. Mrs. Phelps had forgotten her guests as she bent over Carrollton, her fingers clasped in his with mothering tenderness. The girl who had played Grieg leaned back her head, her eyes filled with moody unrest. Dmitri bent forward, his cigarette burning itself to a neglected ash, a little smile on his lips. Almost imperceptibly his eyes watched Carlota.

A strange troubled feeling stole over her. It was as if the music had seized upon her own secret yearnings and was expressing them in all its exotic cadence. Suddenly she caught the eyes of the musician watching her as he played. The studio was dimly lighted from long, pendent temple lamps. The shifting glow from a tall candelabra on the piano showed her his face. It was young, with strong, lean lines, restless, seeking eyes, the chin and mouth lacking the sensuous weakness of the usual virtuoso. When he finished he crossed to her, pausing to answer a few who stopped him on the way. Dmitri sighed heavily and rose.

“See now, he will come and tell you he has been waiting for æons to see your face. He is all on fire. Do not extinguish the flame. He will tread the star path in this mood if you do not pitch him down to earth.”

Carlota drew back from his amused eyes, behind a tall Moorish screen of carved olive fretwork. Why did they all smile at things that were sacred and beyond all sense of touch or sound? If the Marchese would only come near, she would beg him to leave now, now while it was all clear and fresh in her mind, the haunting, hurting sweetness of the music and the long look between them. And as she found her breath, he stood beside her. For the moment they were as isolated as if he had found her alone in some glade of Fontainebleau, like Pierrot and Columbine.

“Why did you try to hide from me?” His tone was low and broken with embarrassment. “I played to you—you knew that, didn’t you? I tried to get to you before, but Dmitri had you. Who are you, you pagan girl with the wonder eyes? Tell me how you slipped in here to-night. Where I come from, we have gorgeous night moths; I love them, brown and tawny. Your eyes are that color, and your face is like a jasmine lifted to the moon. A warm, amber moon in late August, don’t you know. You’ll think I’m a crazy poet if I keep on, but it’s your own fault. You make me want to be a poet and everything else that means adoration of you. Can’t you speak to me?”

She closed her eyes as he gripped her hands in his. It was all so strange, so wrong, she knew how Maria would banish any such mad emotions, and yet she gloried in the tumult in her heart, in the swift response to every word he uttered, the reckless urge within her to turn to him. She strove to conquer it, and answer with composure.

“I think it is dangerous to speak so. Let us go to Mr. Phelps.”

“And your eyes say all the while, ‘I have found you,’” he laughed and took the seat beside her. “That’s what I told myself when you looked at me. I’ve found her. Tell me, truthfully, aren’t you glad to see me, aren’t you?”

Carlota smiled up at him teasingly.

“The man you call Dmitri told me you would say this to me. You should not let him spoil the surprise.”

“Did he? I didn’t think the old gray fra had such discernment. Did he tell you my name? I know yours. It is all the sweethearts of the ages in one. That last thing I played was a Celtic love song; I saw you in a silver mist with the sea behind you and headlands and a girl moon clambering up the stairway of desire.” He stopped short, eyeing her with boyish curiosity. “I wonder just who you are really. You came with old Veracci, didn’t you?”

“I am Italian,” Carlota answered gravely. “I have been here nearly three years. I am a singer.”

“Are you?” he exclaimed eagerly. “That’s why everything in me called out to you. I was in college, the third year, when the war came over here. I had wanted to go with Carrollton, but I was just eighteen then, so I promised my mother I’d wait. She’ll love you,” he added ingenuously. “I went over the next spring and came through all right; that’s how I met Dmitri. We were all wounded about the same time.”

“I thought you said you were all right?”

“I mean I didn’t get killed or anything like that. Isn’t Phelps a wonder? He’d give a dying coyote courage to howl. He told me to stick it out down here. I’m a composer. One of those kinks of fate put me into a perfectly respectable, sane Colorado family. Father was head of some smelter works out there. He started me through Columbia, with a postgrad. in law ahead of me, but I met Carrollton and he heard me play. Now I’m here until I make good.”

“You will be famous.” Carlota’s eyes shone as she looked up at him. “Never have I heard such music, and I have listened to—” She checked herself, a sudden spirit of mischief prompting her. Was he not Pierrot, poor and struggling, with his heart a chalice of faith uplifted to the stars, while she was a child of fortune with the pathway to success fair and broad before her as the sea road to the Campagna back home. But for to-night, only to-night, she would be Columbine for him, straying, friendless Columbine, seeking shelter from the storm. “Some day I hope to be a great singer,” she said softly.

“Do you? You beautiful, dreaming moth girl. And lessons cost like the very devil here in New York.” He ran his fingers through his close-cut blond hair doubtfully, Carlota watching him shyly, thinking how much his profile was like that of a certain young emperor’s on an old Roman coin she had. There was the same straight line from forehead to nostril, the same touch of youth’s arrogance in his curving lips and cleft, projecting chin. “Do you know,” he continued confidently, “I am sure I can help you. I could start you on your lessons, you know. Don’t refuse. I’d love to help you, to even think I was. I have a rocky old studio down on the Square; nothing like this; it’s poverty’s back door compared to it, but if you’ll come there, I will help you.”

“Oh, but it is impossible,” Carlota exclaimed, rising hurriedly. “I never go anywhere alone, it is not the custom with my people. It is so very kind of you, but”—she met his eyes wistfully—“I do not even know your name.”

“I am Griffeth Ames. Ask Veracci, he knows me, so does Phelps. Listen, if you won’t come for your own sake, for God’s pity, come for mine. I’m starving down here for just what you gave me to-night when I first looked into your eyes—inspiration. I must see you and talk to you about my work; I need you. Will you come?”

“The heavens would fall if I did,” she laughed unsteadily, trying to draw her hands from his clasp.

“Let them crash, who cares?” he said. “You’ll come to me, I know you will. I’ll call to you with music till you hear.”

CHAPTER V

Maria was still indisposed on the following day. She asked many questions about the evening before, who the guests had been, and which ones had impressed Carlota. Always her eyes sought the girl’s, testing her answers.

“I should have been happier if you had been there, tanta,” Carlota told her tenderly. “You’re not worrying still, are you? Nobody carried me away.”

Maria closed her eyes as if to shut out any telltale gleam they might have held.

“I blame myself whatever happens,” she sighed dramatically. “I should never have shown you the jewels. The ancient Hindoos are perfectly right. They claim the evil spirits, when imprisoned in the earth, produced gold and gems to ensnare the souls of mankind, especially women. Ah, mia carina, I am growing old and careless. You have made no further engagements?”

“The Marchese did not ask me to go anywhere else.” Carlota bent over a low jar of cyclamen, her face turned away.

“Assuredly not. I am an old fool. Do not speak of the jewels to anybody, not even Jacobelli. I must place them in a safety-deposit vault; not keep them here. And while I am ill, you will not walk through the Park to the studio. I prefer to have you ride always. Come here to me.” She half raised herself as Carlota knelt beside the couch, and framed her face in her palms. “You must not think I am harsh, my dearest one, or trying to keep you from pleasures you should have. It will all come to you in richest measure later on. Now we must be careful of you. You understand it is only because of our great love for you, do you not?”

“I know, surely, I understand.”

“Has no one ever spoken to you on your way to the studio?” Maria’s voice trembled with eager insistence. “Have you ever imagined you were followed? No, no, of course not. Do not be frightened at all. It is only Maria’s old love of the extravagant, the dramatic situation,” she laughed softly, sinking back. “But remember to ride always when you are alone, and speak to no one.”

Wonderingly, guiltily, too, Carlota reassured her, but when she reached the street she looked about her that day, with the first caution she had ever felt since their arrival in New York. What could Maria have meant? They knew no one in the city who could possibly have had any sinister intent towards them, yet there had been a lurking, secret fear in the eyes of the old signora.

At the corner of Fifth Avenue she hailed a taxicab, and arriving at the studio pleaded a headache as an excuse for a short lesson. Jacobelli was in a trying mood. Over and over again he railed at her, telling her that after his months of training, she was not putting her whole heart and soul into her singing. And suddenly Carlota leaned her chin on her palms at the back of the old grand piano, and asked:

“I wonder, maestro, if I were poor and unknown, and came to you, would you give me lessons because you had faith in my voice?”

“Certainly not,” exclaimed Jacobelli positively. “I could never give you enough to win you the highest fame. The teaching is not sufficient. The great artiste must have peace of mind. We do not exist upon air; not even a bird with a celestial voice like yours. No, my dear, I would have told you to forget your pride and do exactly as you have done. Secure the financial backing of a man like Ogden Ward. I worship art. It has always been my life, but I recognize, like a sensible man, that in the times we live in we artists must still seek the patron even as Angelo and Raphael did. The public is not strong enough to sustain us. It cannot sustain itself, what would you? Some day, when the world is all golden with peace and plenty and brotherhood, then the singer will be the beloved prophet once again, and we shall delight in all the milk and honey and oil and burnt offerings we require, without the commonplace formality of contracts.” He laughed at her heartily, leaning over to pat her hands. “Come early to-morrow; Mr. Ward will be here.”

She left the studio with a sense of suffocating rebellion. They were all the same, Jacobelli, Ward, even Maria. Only the gentle, chivalrous old Marchese warmed her faith with his tender, hopeful philosophy, and were not his friends like him, even Dmitri Kavec? What was it this group had seemed to find in the fields of scarlet poppies that lifted idealism and faith in humanity above the creed of success and individual self-seeking?

As she stepped from the old red-brick building, a Greek flower vender wheeled his pushcart to the curb. She looked over the brilliantly tinted asters and chrysanthemums longingly, but purchased merely a spray of autumn leaves and hurried to the corner where the Riverside autobuses passed on their way crosstown to the Avenue.

Following after her leisurely came the man who had picked up her gloves in the vestibule some nights before. It would have been difficult to guess his age or nationality. He was slender, undersized, yet with a strongly knit, athletic frame that told of military training. Swarthy-skinned, dark-haired, with the brilliant black eyes of the southern races, he seemed merely a boy until one saw the somber, detached experience in his expression and eyes. As Carlota, almost trembling at her own temerity, stepped into the interior of a Washington Square ’bus, he followed her, swinging lightly up the narrow, winding staircase to the top.

The number which Griffeth Ames had given her was on the south side of the Square near MacDougal Street. It was an old four-story brownstone building, the last of five of the same kind sitting back in small flagged yards from the sidewalk. The paint which had scaled from its iron portico and balconies merely imitated the stucco front which had crumbled off in large patches. There were many names written on soiled cards and slips of white paper above the rows of bells in the entrance, and among them she found his. Just within the dim hall a young Italian girl knelt on a marble-topped table, polishing the brass ornaments on the old oval hall mirror. She smiled down absently as Carlota asked the way.

“At the very top of the house. You have to knock hard or he won’t hear you.”

She climbed the three flights quickly. The door at the top was ajar. It was surprising to find such spaciousness here under the gabled roof. As she hesitated on the threshold, her swift glance noticed how he had tried to partition off his private life from his professional with burlap draperies. It must have been a bleak place once, but Ames had taken it and had performed all of the customary artistic marvels to conceal its barrenness. Draperies dipped in eastern dyes, that he had picked up in the Syrian quarter on Washington Street, softened the angles of corners. The unsightly wooden partitions and beams below the peaked ceiling had acquired under his deft touch a deep rare old oaken hue the Pre-Raphaelites might have rested under. On the exterior of the low door he had even placed a brass knocker, a real antique from a shop uptown. Nobody, as Dmitri often said, but Fame would ever recognize it, and she, the willful damosel, would never climb those three flights of stairs unless she came en masquerade as a lark to tantalize him.

There was no fire in the deep, black grate. The windows above the broad seats in the gable inglenooks were wide open. The view and the old grand piano that stood crosswise in the room compensated for all other lacks. Ames was visibly embarrassed at her unannounced descent upon his quarters. He sat at a large, plain table drawn up before the south light, coatless, collarless, his hair ruffled into a crest, and ashes everywhere within his arm’s-length radius. Upon one corner of the table there dozed a large yellow tomcat, palpably a nomad.

“I hope I have not come too soon?” she asked hesitantly.

He swept a pile of magazines and papers from a chair for her, but she chose the high window-seat.

“It isn’t that, only I meant to set the stage for you,” he said ruefully. “I wouldn’t have had you find me like this for anything. When Ptolemy and I are alone here working, we just run a bachelor shop, and forget there are any other beings in the world.”

“Make it a dress rehearsal, then. I like it up here very much.” She looked out at the Square, the vivid autumn foliage accentuating the red and gold of the foliage and the vari-colored dresses of the Italian children playing there. It looked like some reckless, impressionistic painting, worked out merely in effective, daring splashes of color laid on with a palette knife. From the windows of Maria’s chosen abode uptown, one gazed down upon an indefinite row of closed, chill, characterless dwellings, with no gleam of color from street to street.

“I would like to live down here too,” she said thoughtfully. “It is very different from anything I have seen in New York before.”

Ames watched her with eager appreciation. Her glossy, luxuriant hair waved back from her low forehead into a loose knot at the nape of her neck. Her face held the elusive appeal of La Cigale’s. The memory of the old painting occurred to him with its appealing beauty and he felt a sudden protective tenderness towards this waif of summer’s idleness.

“It is lonely; that’s the only thing about it,” he said, coming near her. “If it wasn’t for Dmitri and the Phelpses I’d throw up the game sometimes and go West to the smelter.”

“The smelter; what is that?” she asked curiously.

“Where they separate the ore from the quartz, you know, the real from the slag.”

“Slag?” she repeated slowly. “Like the crucible? I know what you mean. I think you are in it now, here, don’t you?”

“Dmitri would love you for that,” he exclaimed eagerly. “It’s all he talks about, the inner meaning of things. Like the crucible, the winepress, anything you like that means the big fight where you either make good or go under. I hate to think it’s just chance. Sometimes when we were over in France, you couldn’t help feeling that it was hit or miss. No matter how clever you were or well trained, you might be killed by any chance fragment of shell that strayed your way. It sort of wiped out the old idea of the plan. Know what I mean?” He quoted slowly, half under his breath:

“Our times are in His hand,

Who said, ‘A whole I planned,

See all, be not afraid.’”

Then, turning quickly to the cat, he lit a cigarette.

“Ptolemy, she comes in here and demoralizes us, old man. I’m getting sentimental.”

He sat down to the piano carelessly, striking low minor chords, and then, unlike Jacobelli, he slipped into the first protesting strains of the duet from “Bohème.” There was an enthusiasm and impulsive buoyancy about him that inspired Carlota to sing even as she had not when she had stood before the great maestro, Ames carrying Rudolpho’s answer.

“Look at me when you sing,” he commanded, and she shook her head in confusion.

“Does she not look at the candle?” she asked. “I—I forget when I look at you.”

But when she had finished, he was almost humble in his supreme gratitude to whatever fate had sent her to his lone garret. With boyish fervor and earnestness he told her the whole world lay at her feet if only he could find a way to teach her.

“I can show you only the first steps of the way, and your voice is so glorious now, so perfect. Who taught you how to use it?”

“Every one sings in Italy,” Carlota said evasively. “Even the girls at the fountains and the boys when they go out in the fishing fleet. I took only a few lessons there.”

Inwardly, she felt overjoyed at the success of her ruse, and agreed to come to him twice a week for lessons if he would accept in payment whatever she was able to give. But he would not listen to this.

“It’s enough to have you as my pupil. When other people hear you sing and know that I have taught you, it will bring me all sorts of other work. I know. Besides, you inspire me. Yes, you do. I don’t know what it is.” He drew in a deep breath, watching her. “Guess we were just a couple of old lazy dubs here, weren’t we, Ptolemy? I’ve wanted to work. It’s all been here in my head, till I couldn’t sleep nights with the themes rampant, but I couldn’t catch them. They were like fireflies. Ever try to get them at night? I did when I was a little chap out West. I always wanted to train them. Must you go so soon? I didn’t get your full name the other night. Carlota, the Marchese called you, didn’t he?”

“Just call me that,” she told him gravely. “I would not be allowed to come here if my people knew. They are very conservative.”

“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” he said confidently. “You’ll never use it in your work. I don’t care just so long as you come. Dmitri said you never would. He walked down here last night with me. Queer chap, isn’t he? Did you like him?”

“I didn’t notice him,” Carlota spoke thoughtfully, not realizing the purport of her own words as she looked up at him on the threshold of the stairs. “I only remembered you.”

CHAPTER VI

The weeks following were filled with a romantic glamour for them both. Ames never realized how much his pupil was teaching him. After he had given her the benefit of what little knowledge he possessed, Carlota would coax him from the piano, and letting her own fingers stray over the keys, would suggest carelessly:

“Do you not like it better this way?”

He never suspected that she was giving him all of Jacobelli’s tricks in teaching, all she knew of the great maestro’s art of technique. He only knew that the fame of his pupil was spreading through the Quarter and that people were coming up the narrow stairs to inquire his rates as teacher of voice culture.

“If I can only get enough to keep the friendly wolf jolly and contented, I can find time to work on my opera,” he told her happily. “I owe it all to you, though. You’ve got such a perfect voice naturally, you don’t need a teacher, and here everybody who hears you sing will give me the credit for it.”

Carlota smiled at him silently, delighted that her visits to the studio were bringing him even a glimmer of success. To her they were all that filled her days now with expectancy. Maria’s ill health continued to prevent her from calling for Carlota every day at the uptown studio, and while she longed to tell the Marchese, she feared that even his solicitude might put an end to the only gleam of romance or adventure that had come to her. So far as she knew, no one had discovered her visits to the Square, yet never did she leave the arched doorway of her home that the nonchalant stranger did not follow her. Patiently, without haste or apparent malevolence, he shadowed her to Jacobelli’s or downtown. Sometimes in the morning, he would lounge at Cecco’s cigar store around the corner on Madison Avenue, smoking his endless store of curious, long, thin cigarettes. From Cecco’s one could look through the middle of the block towards Fifth Avenue, over the tops of intervening fences. The only apartment house was the one where Maria Roma and Carlota lived. And while he chatted over the latest juggling with the fates of nations and peoples overseas, he would forget to look at Cecco rolling cigarettes, and eye the distant fire escapes like a bird of prey, gauging the flight.

One day, as she came from Ames’s place, the impulse swept over Carlota to see the old Marchese and tell him. He would understand, she was sure, and she longed to have him know Griffeth well, to appreciate his work and help him.

Through Maria and Jacobelli she knew that even in New York, where the power of great wealth dominated the will of the people through its manifold channels of politics, society, and charity, yet there was an altar erected even here to the unknown god of truth, and the Marchese stood ever as a high priest of the eternal verities.

“You must not be discouraged, my dear,” he had told her one afternoon at tea beside Maria’s couch. “Look beneath the surface of things. The brass band is always at the head of the procession. Once one has escaped its clamor, one may pay attention to the motive behind the parade, yes? There is always in any race, in any period, a certain group of people, in all walks of life, who worship truth wherever manifest, in art or the grace of right living. It is absurd to claim that any class has a monopoly of this spirit. Ogden Ward is a multi-millionaire, doubtless a thorough robber baron in his way, yet he serves a certain purpose through his fascination for the beautiful and rarest in art. Some day, when, God willing, he passes on, perhaps his collections will be given back to the people. I can do little except encourage this spirit wherever I find it. Casanova, of the Opera, is a noble fellow, yet he must perforce kowtow when the mighty atoms on the subscribers’ list say they will have this or that. But that does not prevent Casanova from his personal worship of real art, you see. I know him very well, indeed, and some day he will meet you.”

Remembering this, Carlota stepped into a shop on Eighth Street and telephoned to the Lafayette. It was the one golden moment when she felt she must see the Marchese and tell him everything, take him back with her to the old studio and make him listen to Ames’s compositions for the new opera. But at that particular instant the Marchese was meeting Ogden Ward at his club by appointment, and the message was left on a slip in his box at the hotel unheeded.

“I want you to meet Count Jurka; used to be with the Bulgarian Legation, remember. He has proven to be a very valuable agent along the new lines of readjustment. I met him in Egypt first in connection with the Rhodopis emeralds. They were found in the royal mummy, and there was some argument in connection with them. I had furnished the means for the research work and I have the emeralds. He is quite a savant in his way when it comes to the history of famous jewels.”

“I do not care for them,” returned the old Marchese blandly, as he ensconced himself in a deep leather armchair and smiled. “Relics of barbarism, my dear Ward; rings in noses and bangles on leaping toes, merely a variation of the same impulse in humanity to decorate itself that we see to-day in certain types of women.”

“And men also. Say it.” Ward leaned forward on the polished table and laid a small leather case before him. “I like to carry unset stones around in my pockets, not for decoration. What would you call me, Marchese?”

“An idolator, either of the beautiful or of the peculiar quality of concentrated value that seems to lie in jewels.”

Ward lifted out two pearls, wrapped in tissue papers, and held them in the hollow of his palm.

“You’re right. Here are the largest gems from the collections of the murdered Empress Elizabeth of Austria. They always darkened when she wore them. She had them dipped regularly in a perforated casket into the sea to restore the luster. It is not alone the value of them that interests me. I like stones that have tragic stories connected with them. There was a necklace of pearls around the throat of Marie Stuart as she was being led to execution. I have never been able to find them. Jurka is also a collector and lover of gems from the historic standpoint. He is standing by the desk now, the tall fellow, fair-haired. Do you recognize him?”

The Marchese looked through the arched doorway at the man Ward had designated. He was trying to place where he had seen him, and suddenly smiled, one forefinger at his forehead.

“He was at the Lafayette a week ago Saturday, dining with Palmieri, Collector of the Port, a delightful person.”

“Well posted on the valuation of jewels,” Ward remarked laconically. He paused to light his favorite pipe with the air of assured bonhomie he assumed when relaxed. “How is Carlota?”

“She progresses well.”

“Why not after two years under Jacobelli? He tells me her technique is faultless, but she lacks temperament.”

“He does not know her,” the Marchese answered placidly. “The temperament is there dormant. It needs but the awakening. She is still a child.”

“Her mother married before she was her age.”

“And never sang at all. Waken the Paoli nature in a girl like Carlota and you will lose her. We do not wish her to experience love, to run the gamut of emotion—it is fatal to a woman of genius. Then, too, afterwards, you always reach her through the husband. Husbands of geniuses—ah, my dear Ward, I could tell you of many catastrophes.”

“Not marriage.” Ward knocked the tobacco from his coat sleeve that had fallen there while he had filled his pipe. “An affair possibly. A quick flurry of passion that might sweep over her like a clarifying fire, burning out the underbrush in her nature. You might arrange a quiet little dinner at my apartment with Signora Roma and Carlota. I do not think I have heard her sing lately.”

He rose at the approach of Count Jurka and presented him. The old Marchese was genial and full of welcome. Had he not seen him already down in the haunt of the selective with Palmieri?

“I did not see you there.” Jurka spoke with a very clear, careful enunciation, his large blue eyes never winking as he met the other’s pleased scrutiny. “Palmieri is interested in some fête for Italian child sufferers of the war—very worthy object. I wished him to meet Mrs. Carrington Nevins, who has been most helpful to me in organizing committees for my own stricken land.”

As they sat down Ward began without preamble, his fingers pressing nervously on the small leather case containing the pearls.

“I told Jurka I thought you could assist him. He is gathering data on rubies. Do you know of one called the Zarathustra? It is a perfect pigeon blood, second to the largest in the world.”

“I am absolutely ignorant concerning jewels,” smiled the Marchese indulgently. “Consider me a perverted mind.”

Jurka leaned slightly towards him.

“I have already traced it to Italy, but many years ago. It was part of a collection, rubies and pearls. I thought it might have come over here and been disposed of to Mr. Ward. It is almost impossible now to find out what has become of most royal jewels, I mean the historic ones. Sooner or later, I have understood, if their tale of tragedy is terrible enough, they find their way here.”

Ward did not pick up the opening. Sauntering away from the club up the Avenue, the Marchese pondered later, not upon the Zarathustra ruby, but on Ward’s invitation. At first he hesitated at a crossing, wishing he might talk it over with Maria, but finally contenting himself with telephoning to her. Carlota caught the rising inflection of exultation as Maria accepted for them both.

“Certainly I’m well enough to go,” she cried; then, hanging up the receiver, “Ah, beloved child, you do not understand the conquest you have made already. But it will not do to appear too eager. You must learn to act like your grandmother, distant, gracious, always the queen.”

But Carlota was supremely indifferent to the favor shown her by Ward. For weeks she had been full of strange, gay little moods and sudden, tempestuous caresses that left Maria breathless and speculative. She smiled over her shoulder now, brushing her long dark curls before the Venetian mirror.

“Surely, bella mia”—Signora Roma spoke with emphasis—“surely you comprehend what this means to your progress. There are yet two years before you, possibly more, before you make your début. Therefore, you must be diplomatic and save your independence until you are assured that the race is won. You must appear perfect at Mr. Ward’s dinner. I will dress you like the starlight, like the pearl from the sea, très ingénue, so he will see the great sensation you will make.”

Carlota laughed teasingly.

“I would love to make my début in some splendid barbaric opera, where I could wear cloth of gold and armlets, bangles. I wish I could sing Semiramide at the very beginning, or Fedora, and you, you adorable old tanta, will probably persuade Jacobelli to make me bow as Juliette or Marguerite.”

“The Veronese are very dark like you, and, thank God, you will still be slender and maiden-like,” sighed Maria reflectively. “It is a wonderful opportunity to impress Mr. Ward. You had better effect Juliette that night.”

“I don’t like this thing you call opportunity. I like, as the Marchese says, what is to be will be. I like the inevitable. It must have been delightful to feel your destiny was written in the stars.” She pinned her hair up carelessly. “Mr. Ward is the only person from whom we have been compelled to borrow money. He will be repaid amply—in money.”

“Only a person who could appreciate the priceless value of such a voice as yours could have had such faith. He is the greatest patron of the arts in the world—”

“I hate patronage. It simply means that he can pay the highest price for what he desires, that is all.” Carlota turned to her stormily.

“Another may have a million times more appreciation, more love, more yearning to aid, and still stand with hands bound because he has no money. I hate patronage. I would rather sell every jewel in your treasure chests than give a man like Ogden Ward the right to order my appearance at his dinner.”

At Maria’s gesture of despair her mood changed instantly to one of coaxing tenderness. To please her only would she go, not because Ward wished her to. She had hurried home after telephoning the Marchese, and his message had come when she had felt most rebellious. It had become increasingly difficult for her to get away for her lessons with Ames twice a week. To-day Signora Roma had been more curious than ever, and it had taken the most elusive of excuses to soothe her. All manner she had made up so far, little necessary trips to the art shops, the galleries, the quiet cathedral, feeling that she was indeed playing Columbine in the garret studio down on the Square. Yet she was almost forced to attend a dinner given by Ward as if it were an honor bestowed by him. This they would urge her to do, Maria, Jacobelli, and even the Marchese; yet, if they knew of her visits to Ames, she would be compelled to stop them because they were unconventional.

Almost in a spirit of audacious bravado, she deliberately started for the studio the following morning. It would be a surprise to Ames, and she wanted to talk over the dinner with him. For the first time in weeks the watching figure was absent from its customary post near Cecco’s store. When she left the ’bus, it seemed as if she could have lifted her whole heart to the Quarter in relief. It was like some enchanted realm to her where hopes and dreams were tangible, and only facts untrue. Spring stood tiptoe on the Arch and scattered her soul-disturbing germs abroad. She knelt at the edge of the old fountain and mimed at herself in the water that had just been permitted to splash therein from the far-off springs of Askohan quite as if they had flowed from Castalian founts. She flirted with the rainbow that hangs over the leaping spray on sunny mornings, and wigwagged joyous discontent to every possible shepherd in the distance.

From a flower-stand at the corner Carlota recklessly bought daffodils and narcissus. They had grown in phalanxes along the wall of Tittani. Almost she had decided to tell Maria and Jacobelli she would never go to the dinner, never accept any more aid from Mr. Ward, when suddenly she was arrested by the sight of a dark gray limousine standing at the curb in front of Ames’s residence. Clinging around it was a flock of little Italian children, trying to peer into the interior sanctum, a study in suède leather with dark red Jacqueminot roses in slender French gray silver vases in each corner.

She hesitated outside the studio door. A clear, well-modulated voice came from within, a woman’s voice.

“Twice a week, then, Mr. Ames, and we will not speak of terms. I have heard of your wonderful success with beginners, and Nathalie’s temperament requires an environment like this, unusual and bizarre, don’t you know? It wilts at any touch of the customary or mediocre that you find in most musical studios uptown. Here you fairly radiate atmosphere.”

She hesitated just as Ames opened the door. He looked flushed and elated, and seized her hand to present her to his callers.

“Oh, but we have already heard of you, Miss—er—Carlota!” Mrs. Carrington Nevins exclaimed. “This must be your little Italian pupil who sings so charmingly, Mr. Ames. Chandos told us all about you at his tea last week, how you came and went like a little flitting city sparrow, and not even Mr. Ames knew your real name.”

Carlota stood in silence, her chin lifted, her long lashes downcast as she drew off her gloves slowly. The daffodils and narcissus lay in the curve of her arm. She caught a little smile on the face of the girl standing with Ames, this tall, fair girl with the ice-blue eyes, and a wave of fiery scorn swept over her at this invasion of her own particular haunt, Columbine’s special chimney-pot.

“You must hear her sing,” Ames said positively, going to the piano. “Lay off your things, Carlota. I want you just to try that little barcarolle you taught me.”