Part 3
And then, before anything decisive had been done with regard to the settlement—before Brosy and Dosy had taken up their quarters for good beneath the roof of their adopted parent—a change befell, and Galahad received an imploring note from Mrs. Kingdom soliciting his instant presence upon “an urgent matter.”
“She has thought better of it,” said Galahad to himself, as he obeyed the summons. “Her native good sense”—you will realize that the man must have been genuinely in love to believe in Laura’s native good sense—“has come to her aid!” And in his mind’s eye he beheld the long, narrow backs of the twins walking away into a dim perspective.
It was September. Dosy and Brosy were shooting the widow’s partridges, and Galahad found her alone. She was pleased and excited, with an air of one who with difficulty keeps the cork in a bottle of mystery; and when she clasped her hands round Galahad’s arm and told him what a true, true friend he was! he felt absurdly tender, as he begged her to confide her trouble to him.
“I have made such a dreadful discovery,” Laura gasped, dabbing her eyes with a filmy little square of cambric edged with the narrowest possible line of black, “about the—about the boys.”
Galahad strove to compose his features into an expression of decent regret.
“Mr. Ambrose and Mr. Theodosius Lasher.... I rather anticipated that you—that possibly there were discoveries to be made.” He turned his weary gray eyes upon Laura, and pulled at one wiry end of his little gingery mustache. “Have they done anything very bad?” he asked, and his tone was not uncheerful.
“Bad!” echoed Laura, with indignant scorn. “As though two young men gifted with natures like theirs”—she had left off calling them “boys,” Galahad noticed—“so lofty, so noble, so unselfish—and yes, I will say it, so pure!—could possibly be guilty of any bad or even doubtful
## action. But you do not know them, and you are prejudiced; you must admit
you are prejudiced when you hear the—the truth.” The cork escaped, and the secret came with it in a gush. “It is this: I cannot be a mother to Dosy and Brosy; they, poor dears, cannot be my sons. I had not the least idea of their true feeling with regard to me, nor had they, until quite recently.” She swallowed a little sob and dabbed her eyes again. “Oh, Galahad, they are madly in love with me, both of them. What, what am I to do?”
“Send them to the devil, the impudent young beggars!” snorted Galahad. And, striding up and down between the trembling china-tables with clenched fists and angry eyes, he said all the things he had longed to say about folly, and madness and infatuation.
A woman will always submit with a good grace to masculine upbraiding when she has reason to believe the upbraider jealous. Laura bore his reproaches with saintly sweetness.
“They have behaved in the most honorable way, poor darlings!” she protested, “though the realization of the true nature of their feelings towards me, of course, came as a terrible shock. The deeds of settlement had been drawn up. We planned, as soon as everything had been sealed and signed, that the dear boys were to come and live here. I had furnished their bedrooms exactly alike, and fitted up the smoking-room with twin armchairs, twin tobacco-tables, and so on, when the blow fell.” She deepened her voice to a thrilling whisper. “Dosy, looking quite pale and tragic, asked for an interview in the conservatory; Brosy begged for a private word in the pavilion at the end of the upper croquet-lawn. And then,” said Laura, shedding abundant tears, “I knew what I had done. It did occur to me that I might—might marry Brosy and adopt Dosy as my son, or marry Dosy and regard Brosy as an heir. But no, it could not be. Dosy proposed to take poison, or shoot himself, in the most unselfish way; and Brosy suggested going in for a swim too soon after breakfast, and never rising from a dive again. But neither could endure to live to see me the bride of the other,” sobbed Laura.
“And as this is England, and not Malabar,” uttered Galahad, dryly, “the law is against your marrying both.”
“Why, of course, my dear Galahad,” cried Laura innocently, scandalized and round-eyed.
The man who really loved her looked at her and forgave her foolishness. She had set the County buzzing with the tale of her absurd infatuation; she had compromised her dignity by the tragic follies of the past few months; there was but one way of gagging the scandalmongers and regaining lost ground, one way of getting out of the _impasse_. Galahad pointed out that way, as Laura entreated him to suggest something.
“Why not marry me?” he said bluntly.
“Oh, Galahad!” cried Laura, bright-eyed and quite pleasantly thrilled. “And then we can both adopt the boys.”
“Whether they embrace that idea or not,” said Galahad, with his arm round the long-coveted waist, “remains to be seen. But I promise you, if occasion should arise, that I will act as a father to them.”
He went out, in his new parental character, to look for Dosy and Brosy and break the joyful news. His freckled little face was beaming with smiles, his usually weary gray eyes were alight; he smiled under his bristly little mustache as he selected a stout but stinging Malacca cane from the late Thompson Kingdom’s collection in the hall....
A DISH OF MACARONI
On the occasion of the tenth biennial visit of the Carlo Da Capo Grand Opera Combination to the musical, if murky, city of Smutchester, the principal members of the company pitched their tents, as was their wont, at the Crown Diamonds Hotel, occupying an entire floor of that capacious caravanserie, whose _chef_, to the grief of many honest British stomachs and the unrestrained joy of these artless children of song, was of cosmopolitan gifts, being an Italian-Spanish-Swiss-German. Here _prime donne_, tenors, and bassos could revel in national dishes from which their palates had long been divorced, and steaming masses of yellow polenta, _knüdels_, and _borsch_, heaped dishes of sausages and red cabbage, ragouts of cockscombs and chicken-livers, veal stewed with tomatoes, frittura of artichokes, with other culinary delicacies strange of aspect and garlicky as to smell, loaded the common board at each meal, only to vanish like the summer snow, so seldom seen but so constantly referred to by the poetical fictionist, amidst a Babel of conversation which might only find its parallel in the parrot-house at the Zoo. Ringed hands plunged into salad-bowls; the smoke of cigarettes went up in the intervals between the courses; the meerschaum-colored lager of Munich, the yellow beer of Bass, the purple Chianti, or the vintage of Epernay brimmed the glasses; and the coffee that crowned the banquet was black and thick and bitter as the soul of a singer who has witnessed the triumph of a rival.
For singers can be jealous: and the advice of Dr. Watts is more at discount behind the operatic scenes, perhaps, than elsewhere. For women may be, and are, jealous of other women; and men may be, and are, jealous of men, off the stage; but it is reserved for the hero and heroine of the stage to be jealous of one another. The glare of the footlights, held by so many virtuous persons to be inimical to the rosebud of innocence, has a curiously wilting and shriveling effect upon the fine flower of chivalry. Signor Alberto Fumaroli, _primo uomo_, and possessor of a glorious tenor, was possessed by the idea that the chief soprano, De Melzi, the enchanting Teresa—still in the splendor of her youth, with ebony tresses, eyes of jet, skin of ivory, an almost imperceptible mustache, and a figure of the most seductive, doomed ere long to expand into a pronounced _embonpoint_—had adorned her classic temples with laurels which should by rights have decked his own. The press-cuttings of the previous weeks certainly balanced in her favor. Feeble-minded musical critics, of what the indignant tenor termed “provincial rags,” lauded the Signora to the skies. She was termed a “springing fountain of crystal song,” a “human bulbul in the rose-garden of melody.” Eulogy had exhausted itself upon her; while he, Alberto Fumaroli, the admired of empresses, master of the emotions of myriads of American millionairesses, he was fobbed off with half a dozen patronizing lines. Glancing over the paper in the saloon carriage, he had seen the impertinent upper lip of the De Melzi, tipped with the faintest line of shadow, curl with delight as she scanned each accursed column in turn, and handed the paper to her aunt (a vast person invariably clad in the tightest and shiniest of black satins, and crowned with a towering hat of violet velvet adorned with once snowy plumes and crushed crimson roses), who went everywhere with her niece, and mounted guard over the exchequer. Outwardly calm as Vesuvius, and cool as a Neapolitan ice on a hot day, the outraged Alberto endured the triumph of the women, marked the subterranean chuckles of the stout Signora, the mischievous enjoyment of Teresa; pulled his Austrian-Tyrolese hat over his Corsican brows, and vowed a wily _vendetta_. His opportunity for wreaking retribution would come at Smutchester, he knew. Wagner was to be given at the Opera House, and as great as the previous triumph of Teresa de Melzi in the rôle of Elsa—newly added by the soprano to her _repertoire_—should be her fall. _Evviva!_ Down with that fatally fascinating face, smiling so provokingly under its laurels! She should taste the consequences of having insulted a Neapolitan. And the tenor smiled so diabolically that Zamboni, the basso, sarcastically inquired whether Fumaroli was rehearsing _Mephistofole_?
“Not so, dear friend,” Fumaroli responded, with a dazzling show of ivories. “In that part I should make a _bel fiasco_; I have no desire to emulate a basso or a bull.... But in this—the rôle in which I am studying to perfect myself—I predict that I shall achieve a dazzling success.” He drew out a green Russia-leather cigarette case, adorned with a monogram in diamonds. “It is permitted that one smokes?” he added, and immediately lighted up.
“It is permitted, if I am to have one also.”
The De Melzi stretched a white, bejeweled hand out, and the seething Alberto, under pain of appearing openly impolite, was forced to comply. “No, I will not take the cigarette you point out,” said the saucy _prima donna_, as the tenor extended the open case. “It might disagree with me, who knows? and I have predicted that in the part of Elsa to-morrow night at Smutchester _I_ shall achieve a ‘dazzling success.’” And she smiled with brilliant malice upon Alberto Fumaroli, who played Lohengrin. “They are discriminating—the audiences of that big, black, melancholy place—they never mistake geese for swans.”
“_Ach_, no!” said the Impresario, looking up from his tatting—he was engaged upon a green silk purse for Madame Da Capo, a wrinkled little doll of an old lady with whom he was romantically in love. “They will not take a _dournure_, some declamation, and half a dozen notes in the upper register _bour dout botage_. Sing to them well, they will be ready to give you their heads. But sing to them badly, and they will be ready to pelt yours. Twenty years ago they did. I remember a graceless impostor, a _ragazzo_ (foisted upon me for a season by a villain of an agent), who annoyed them in _Almaviva_.... _Ebbene_! the elections were in progress—there was a _dimonstranza_. I can smell those antique eggs, those decomposed oranges, now.”
“Heart’s dearest, thou must not excite thyself,” interrupted Madame; “it is so bad for thee. Play at the poker-game, _mes enfants_,” she continued, “and leave my good child, my beloved little one, alone!” Saying this, Madame drew from her vast under-pocket a neat case containing an ivory comb, and, removing the fearfully and wonderfully braided traveling cap of the Impresario, fell to combing his few remaining hairs until, soothed by the process, Carlo, who had been christened Karl, fell asleep with his head on Madame’s shoulder; snoring peacefully, despite the screams, shrieks, howls, and maledictions which were the invariable accompaniment of the poker-game.
The train bundled into Smutchester some hours later; a string of cabs conveyed the Impresario, his wife, and the principal members of his company to the Crown Diamonds Hotel. Before he sought his couch that night the revengeful Alberto Fumaroli had interviewed the _chef_ and bribed him with the gift of a box of regalias from the cedar smoking-cabinet of a King, to aid in the carrying-out of the _vendetta_. Josebattista Funkmuller was not a regal judge of cigars; but these were black, rank, and oily enough to have made an Emperor most imperially sick. Besides, the De Melzi had, or so he declared, once ascribed an indigestion which had ruined, or so she swore, one of her grandest _scenas_, to an omelette of his making, and the cook was not unwilling that the haughty spirit of the _cantatrice_ should be crushed. His complex nature, his cosmopolitan origin, showed in the plan Josebattista Funkmuller now evolved and placed before the revengeful tenor, who clasped him to his bosom in an ecstasy of delight, planting at the same time a huge, resounding kiss upon both his cheeks.
“It is perfection!” Fumaroli cried. “My friend, it can scarcely fail! If it should, _per Bacco_! the Fiend himself is upon that insolent creature’s side! But I never heard yet of his helping a woman to resist temptation—_oh, mai!_ it is he who spreads the board and invites Eve.”
And the tenor retired exultant. His sleeping-chamber was next door to that of the hated _cantatrice_. He dressed upon the succeeding morning to the accompaniment of _roulades_ trilled by the owner of the lovely throat to which Fumaroli would so willingly have given the fatal squeeze. And as Fumaroli, completing his frugal morning ablutions by wiping his beautiful eyes and classic temples very gingerly with a damp towel, paused to listen, a smile of peculiar malignancy was only partly obscured by the folds of the towel. But when the tenor and the soprano encountered at the twelve o’clock _déjeuner_, Fumaroli’s politeness was excessive, and his large, dark, brilliant eyes responded to every glance of the gleaming black orbs of De Melzi with a languorous, melting significance which almost caused her heart to palpitate beneath her Parisian corsets. Concealed passion lay, it might be, behind an affectation of enmity and ill-will.
“_Mai santo cielo!_” exclaimed the stout aunt, to whom the _cantatrice_ subsequently revealed her suspicions, “thou guessest always as I myself have thought. The unhappy man is devoured by a grand passion for my Teresa. He grinds his teeth, he calls upon the saints, he grows more bilious every day, and thou more beautiful. One day he will declare himself——”
“And I shall lose an entertaining enemy, to find a stupid lover,” gurgled Teresa. She was looking divine, her dark beauty glowing like a gem in the setting of an Eastern silk of shot turquoise and purple, fifty yards of which an enamored noble of the Ukraine had thrown upon the stage of the Opera House, St. Petersburg, wound round the stem of a costly bouquet. She glanced in the mirror as she kissed the black nose of her Japanese pug. “Every man becomes stupid after a while,” she went on. “Even Josebattista is in love with me. He sends me a little note written on _papier jambon_ to entreat an interview.”
“My soul!” cried the stout aunt, “thou wilt not deny him?”
The saucy singer shook her head as Funkmuller tapped at the door. One need not give in detail the interview that eventuated. It is enough that the intended treachery of Fumaroli was laid bare. His intended victim laughed madly.
“But it is a _cerotto_—what the English call a nincompoop,” she gasped, pressing a laced handkerchief to her streaming eyes. “If the heavens were to fall, then one could catch larks; but the proverb says nothing about nightingales.”
She tossed her brilliant head and took a turn or two upon the hotel sitting-room carpet, considering.
“I will keep this appointment,” said she.
“_Dio!_ And risk thy precious reputation?” shrieked the aunt.
“Chi sa? Chi sa? Evviva l’opportunita!”
hummed the provoking beauty. And she dealt the cook a sparkling glance of such intelligence that he felt Signor Alberto would never triumph. Relieved in mind, Josebattista Funkmuller took his leave.
“I will return the King’s cigars,” he said, as he pressed his garlic-scented mustache to the pearly knuckles of the lady.
“Bah!” said she, “they were won in a raffle at Vienna.”
The door closed upon the disgusted _chef_, and reopened ten minutes later to admit a waiter carrying upon a salver a pretty three-cornered pink note with a gold monogram in the corner. The writer entreated the inestimable privilege of three minutes’ conversation with Madame de Melzi in a private apartment in the basement of the hotel. He did not propose to visit the _prima donna_ in her own rooms, even under the wing of her aunt, for it was of supreme importance that tongues should not be set wagging. Delicacy and respect prevented him from suggesting an interview in the apartments occupied by himself. On the neutral ground of an office in the basement the interview might take place without comment or interruption. He was, in fact, waiting there for an answer.
The answer came in the person of the singer herself, charmingly dressed and radiant with loveliness.
“Fie! What an underground hole! The window barred, the blank wall of an area beyond it!” Her beautiful nostrils quivered. “_Caro mio_, you have in that covered dish upon the table there something that smells good. What is under the cover?”
“Look and see!” said the cunning tenor, with a provoking smile.
“I am not curious,” responded Teresa, putting both hands behind her and leaning her back against the door. “Come, hurry up! One of your three minutes has gone by, the other two will follow, and I shall be obliged to take myself off without having heard this mysterious revelation. What is it?” She showed a double row of pearl-hued teeth in a mischievous smile. “Shall I guess? You have, by chance, fallen in love with me, and wish to tell me so? How dull and unoriginal! A vivacious, interesting enemy is to be preferred a million times before a stupid friend or a commonplace adorer.”
“_Grazie a Dio!_” said the tenor, “I am not in love with you.” But at that moment he was actually upon the verge; and the dull, dampish little basement room, floored with kamptulicon warmed by a grudging little gas-stove, its walls adorned with a few obsolete and hideous prints, its oilcloth-covered table, on which stood the mysterious dish, closely covered, bubbling over a spirit lamp and flanked by a spoon, fork, and plate—that little room might have been the scene of a declaration instead of a punishment had it not been for the De Melzi’s amazing nonchalance. It would have been pleasant to have seen the spiteful little arrow pierce that lovely bosom. But instead of frowning or biting her lips, Teresa laughed with the frankest grace in the world.
“Dear Signor Alberto, Heaven has spared you much. Besides, you are of those who esteem quantity above quality—and, for a certain thing, I should be torn to pieces by the ladies of the Chorus.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Well, what is this mysterious communication? The three minutes are up, the fumes of a gas fire are bad for the throat—and I presume you of all people would not wish me to sing ‘Elsa’ with a veiled voice, and disappoint the dear people of Smutchester, and Messieurs the critics, who say such kind things.”
Alberto Fumaroli’s brain spun round. Quick as thought his supple hand went out; the wrist of the coquettish _prima donna_ was imprisoned as in a vise of steel.
“_Ragazza!_” he gnashed out, “you shall pay for your cursed insolence.” He swung the _cantatrice_ from the door, and Teresa, noting the convulsed workings of his Corsican features, and devoured by the almost scorching glare of his fierce eyes, felt a thrill of alarm.
“_Oimè!_ Signor,” she faltered, “what do you mean by this violence? Recollect that we are not now upon the stage.”
A harsh laugh came from the bull throat of the tenor.
“By mystic Love Brought from the distance In thy hour of need. Behold me, O Elsa! Loveliest, purest— Thine own Unknown!”
he hummed. But his Elsa did not entreat to flow about his feet like the river, or kiss them like the flowers blooming amidst the grasses he trod. Struggling in vain for release from the rude, unchivalrous grasp, an idea came to her; she stooped her beautiful head and bit Lohengrin smartly on the wrist, evoking, instead of further music, a torrent of curses; and as Alberto danced and yelled in agony, she darted from the room. With the key she had previously extracted she locked the door; and as her light footsteps and crisping draperies retreated along the passage, the tenor realized that he was caught in his own trap. Winding his handkerchief about his smarting wrist, he bestowed a few more hearty curses upon Teresa, and sat down upon a horsehair-covered chair to wait for deliverance. They could not possibly give “Lohengrin” without him—there was no understudy for the part. For her own sake, therefore, the De Melzi would see him released in time to assume the armor of the Knight of the Swan. _Ebbene!_ There was nothing to do but wait. He looked at his watch, a superb timepiece encrusted with brilliants. Two o’clock! And the opera did not commence until eight. Six hours to spend in this underground hole, if no one came to let him out. Patience! He would smoke. He got over half an hour with the aid of the green cigarette-case. Then he did a little pounding at the door. This bruised his tender hands, and he soon left off and took to shouting. To the utmost efforts of his magnificent voice no response was made; the part of the hotel basement in which his prison happened to be situated was, in the daytime, when all the servants were engaged in their various departments, almost deserted. Therefore, after an hour of shouting, Fumaroli abandoned his efforts.
What was to be done? He could take a _siesta_, and did, extended upon two of the grim horsehair chairs with which the apartment was furnished. He slept excellently for an hour, and woke hungry.
Hungry! _Diavolo!_ with what a raging hunger—an appetite of Gargantuan proportions, sharpened to the pitch of famine by the bubbling gushes of savory steam that jetted from underneath the cover of the mysterious dish still simmering over its spirit-lamp upon the table! He knew what that dish contained—his revenge, in fact. Well, it had missed fire, the _vendetta_. He who had devised the ordeal of temptation for Teresa found himself helpless, exposed to its fiendish seductions. Not that he would be likely to yield, _oh mai!_ was it probable? He banished the idea with a gesture full of superb scorn and a haughty smile. Never, a thousand times never! The cunning Teresa should be disappointed. That evening’s performance should be attacked by him as ever, fasting, the voice of melody, the sonorous lungs, supported by an empty frame. _Cospetto!_ how savory the smell that came from that covered dish! The unhappy tenor moved to the table, snuffed it up in nosefuls, thought of flinging the dish and its contents out of window—would have done so had not the window been barred.