The Fatal Three · III

CHAPTER I. A WRECKED LIFE.

Monsieur Leroy was interested in his visitor, and in nowise hastened her departure. He led her through the garden of the asylum, anxious that she should see that sad life of the shattered mind in its milder aspect. The quieter patients were allowed to amuse themselves at liberty in the garden, and here Mildred saw the woman who fancied herself the Blessed Virgin, and who sat apart from the rest, with a crown of withered anemones upon her iron-gray locks.

The doctor stopped to talk to her in the Niçois language, describing her hallucination to Mildred in his broken English between whiles.

“She is one of my oldest cases, and mild as a lamb,” he said. “She is what superstition had made her. She might have been a happy wife as a mother but for that fatal influence. Ah, here comes[Pg 4] a lady of a very different temper, and not half so easy a subject!”

A woman of about sixty advanced towards them along the dusty gravel path between the trampled grass and the dust-whitened orange-trees, a woman who carried her head and shoulders with the pride of an empress, and who looked about her with defiant eyes, fanning herself with a large Japanese paper fan as she came along, a fan of vivid scarlet and cheap gilt paper, which seemed to intensify the brightness of her great black eyes, as she waved it to and fro before her haggard face: a woman who must once have been beautiful.

“Would you believe that lady was prima donna at La Scala nearly forty years ago?” asked the doctor, as he and Mildred stood beside the path, watching that strange figure, with its theatrical dignity.

The massive plaits of grizzled black hair were wound, coronet-wise, about the woman’s head. Her rusty black velvet gown trailed in the dust, threadbare long ago, almost in tatters to-day: a gown of a strange fashion, which had been worn upon the[Pg 5] stage—Leonora’s or Lucrezia’s gown, perhaps, once upon a time.

At sight of the physician she stopped suddenly, and made him a sweeping curtsy, with all the exaggerated grace of the theatre.

“Do you know if they open this month at the Scala?” she asked, in Italian.

“Indeed, my dear, I have heard nothing of their doings.”

“They might have begun their season with the new year,” she said, with a dictatorial air. “They always did in my time. Of course you know that they have tried to engage me again. They wanted me for Amina, but I had to remind them that I am not a light soprano. When I reappear it shall be as Lucrezia Borgia. There I stand on my own ground. No one can touch me there.”

She sang the opening bars of Lucrezia’s first scena. The once glorious voice was rough and discordant, but there was power in the tones even yet, and real dramatic fire in the midst of exaggeration. Suddenly while she was singing she caught the expression of Mildred’s face watching her, and she[Pg 6] stopped at a breath, and grasped the stranger by both hands with an excited air.

“That moves you, does it not?” she exclaimed. “You have a soul for music. I can see that in your face. I should like to know more of you. Come and see me whenever you like, and I will sing to you. The doctor lets me use his piano sometimes, when he is in a good humour.”

“Say rather when you are reasonable, my good Maria,” said Monsieur Leroy, laying a fatherly hand upon her shoulder; “there are days when you are not to be trusted.”

“I am to be trusted to-day. Let me come to your room and sing to her,” pointing to Mildred with her fan. “I like her face. She has the eyes and lips that console. Her husband is lucky to have such a wife. Let me sing to her. I want her to understand what kind of woman I am.”

“Would it bore you too much to indulge her, madame?” asked the doctor in an undertone. “She is a strange creature, and it will wound her if you refuse. She does not often take a fancy to any[Pg 7] one; but she frequently takes dislikes, and those are violent.”