The Splendid Folly. Margaret Pedler
a reassuring pat on the shoulder he pushed the young man affectionately through the doorway and closed the door behind him.
So he had not been dismissed in disgrace after all! Diana breathed a sigh of relief, and, looking up, found Signor Baroni regarding her with a large and benevolent smile.
"You theenk I was too severe with him?" he said placidly. "But no. He is like iron, that young man; he wants hammer-blows."
"I think he got them," replied Diana crisply, and then stopped, aghast at her own temerity. She glanced anxiously at Baroni to see if he had resented her remark, only to find him surveying her with a radiant smile and looking exactly like a large, pleased child.
"We shall get on, the one with the other," he observed contentedly. "Yes, we shall get on. And now—who are you? I do not remember names"—with a terrific roll of his R's—"but you haf a very pree-ty face—and I never forget a pree-ty face."
"I'm—I'm Diana Quentin," she blurted out, nervousness once more overpowering her as she realised that the moment of her ordeal was approaching. "I've come to have my voice tried."
Baroni picked up a memorandum book from his table, turning over the pages till he came to her name.
"Ach! I remember now. Miss Waghorne—my old pupil sent you. She has been teaching you, isn't it so?"
Diana nodded.
"Yes, I've had a few lessons from her, and she hoped that possibly you would take me as a pupil."
It was out at last—the proposal which now, in the actual presence of the great man himself, seemed nothing less than a piece of stupendous presumption.
Signor Baroni's eyes roamed inquiringly over the face and figure of the girl before him—quite possibly querying as to whether or no she possessed the requisite physique for a singer. Nevertheless, the great master was by no means proof against the argument of a pretty face. There was a story told of him that, on one occasion, a girl with an exceptionally fine voice had been brought to him, some wealthy patroness having promised to defray the expenses of her training if Baroni would accept her as a pupil. Unfortunately, the girl was distinctly plain, with a quite uninteresting plainness of the pasty, podgy description, and after he had heard her sing, the maestro, first dismissing her from the room, had turned to the lady who was prepared to stand sponsor for her, and had said, with an inimitable shrug of his massive shoulders:—
"The voice—it is all right. But the girl—heavens, madame, she is of an ugliness! And I cannot teach ugly people. She has the face of a peeg—please take her away."
But there was little fear that a similar fate would befall Diana. Her figure, though slight with the slenderness of immaturity, was built on the right lines, and her young, eager face, in its frame of raven hair, was as vivid as a flower—its clear pallor serving but to emphasise the beauty of the straight, dark brows and of the scarlet mouth with its ridiculously short upper-lip. Her eyes were of that peculiarly light grey which, when accompanied, as hers were, by thick black lashes, gives an almost startling impression each time the lids are lifted, an odd suggestion of inner radiance that was vividly arresting.
An intense vitality, a curious shy charm, the sensitiveness inseparable from the artist nature—all these, and more, Baroni's experienced eye read in Diana's upturned face, but it yet remained for him to test the quality of her vocal organs.
"Well, we shall see," he said non-committally. "I do not take many pupils."
Diana's heart sank yet a little lower, and she felt almost tempted to seek refuge in immediate flight rather than remain to face the inevitable dismissal that she guessed would be her portion.
Baroni, however, put a summary stop to any such wild notions by turning on her with the lightning-like change of mood which she came afterwards to know as characteristic of him.
"You haf brought some songs?" He held out his hand. "Good. Let me see them."
He glanced swiftly through the roll of music which she tendered.
"This one—we will try this. Now"—seating himself at the piano—"open your mouth, little nightingale, and sing."
Softly he played the opening bars of the prelude to the song, and Diana watched fascinatedly while he made the notes speak, and sing, and melt into each other with his short stumpy fingers that looked as though they and music would have little enough in common.
"Now then. Bee-gin."
And Diana began. But she was so nervous that she felt as though her throat had suddenly closed up, and only a faint, quavering note issued from her lips, breaking off abruptly in a hoarse croak.
Baroni stopped playing.
"Tchut! she is frightened," he said, and laid an encouraging hand on her shoulder. "But do not be frightened, my dear. You haf a pree-ty face; if your voice is as pree-ty as your face you need not haf fear."
Diana was furious with herself for failing at the critical moment, and even more angry at Baroni's speech, in which she sensed a suggestion of the tolerance extended to the average drawing-room singer of mediocre powers.
"I don't want to have a pretty voice!" she broke out, passionately. "I wouldn't say thank you for it."
And anger having swallowed up her nervousness, she opened her mouth—and her throat with it this time?—and let out the full powers that were hidden within her nice big larynx.
When she ceased, Baroni closed the open pages of the song, and turning on his stool, regarded her for a moment in silence.
"No," he said at last, dispassionately. "It is certainly not a pree-ty voice."
To Diana's ears there was such a tone of indifference, such an air of utter finality about the brief speech, that she felt she would have been eternally grateful now could she only have passed the low standard demanded by the possession of even a merely "pretty" voice.
"So this is the voice you bring me to cultivate?" continued the maestro. "This that sounds like the rumblings of a subterranean earthquake? Boom! boo-o-om! Like that, nicht wahr?"
Diana crimsoned, and, feeling her knees giving way beneath her, sank into the nearest chair, while Baroni continued to stare at her.
"Then—then you cannot take me as a pupil?" she said faintly.
Apparently he did not hear her, for he asked abruptly:—
"Are you prepared to give up everything—everything in the world for art? She is no easy task-mistress, remember! She will want a great deal of your time, and she will rob you of your pleasures, and for her sake you will haf to take care of your body—to guard your physical health—as though it were the most precious thing on earth. To become a great singer, a great artiste, means a life of self-denial. Are you prepared for this?"
"But—but—" stammered Diana in astonishment. "If my voice is not even pretty—if it is no good—"
"No good?" he exclaimed, leaping to his feet with a rapidity of movement little short of marvellous in a man of his size and bulk. "Gran Dio! No good, did you say? But, my child, you haf a voice of gold—pure gold. In three years of my training it will become the voice of the century. Tchut! No good!"
He pranced nimbly to the door and flung it open.
"Giulia! Giulia!" he shouted, and a minute later a fat, amiable-looking woman, whose likeness to Baroni proclaimed them brother and sister, came hurrying downstairs in answer to his call. "Signora Evanci, my sister," he said, nodding to Diana. "This, Giulia, is a new pupil, and I would haf you hear her voice. It is magnificent—épatant! Open your mouth, little singing-bird, once more. This time we will haf some scales."
Bewildered and excited, Diana sang again, Baroni testing the full compass of her voice until quite suddenly he shut down the lid of the piano.
"It is enough," he said solemnly, and then, turning to Signora Evanci, began talking