Fair Margaret
Page 162It did not at first occur to him that Margaret had really changed since
he had met her, and not exactly in the way he might have wished.
Instead of showing any inclination to give up the stage, as he had
hoped that she might, she seemed more and more in love with her future
career.
When he had first met her he had made the acquaintance of a strikingly
good-looking English girl, born and brought up a lady, full of talent
and enthusiasm for her art, but as yet absolutely ignorant of
professional artistic life and still in a state of mind in which some
sides of it were sure to be disagreeable to her, if not absolutely
repulsive.
Hidden in his box, and watching her as well as listening to her, he
should have prepared him for it. He recollected, for instance, her
perfect coolness and self-possession with Madame Bonanni, so absolutely
different from the paralysing shyness, the visible fright and the
pitiful helplessness at the moment of trial, which he had more than
once seen in young girls who came to Madame Bonanni for advice. They
had good voices, too, those poor trembling candidates; many of them had
talent of a certain order; but it was not the real thing, there was not
the real strength behind it, there was not the absolute self-reliance
to steady it; above all, there was not the tremendous physical
organisation which every great singer possesses.
But Margaret had all that; in other words, she had every gift that
familiar to her, those gifts, suddenly called into play, exerted their
influence directly upon her character and manner. She was born to be a
professional artist, to face the public and make it applaud her, to
believe in her own talent, to help herself, to trust to her nerves and
to defend herself with cool courage in moments of danger.
This was assuredly not the girl with whom Logotheti had fallen in love
at first sight, whom he, as well as Lushington, had believed far too
refined and delicately brought up to be happy in the surroundings of a
stage life, and much too sensitive to bear such familiarity as being
addressed as 'Cordova,' without any prefix, by an Italian tenor singer
whose father had kept a butcher's shop in Turin.
were all there still, for such things do not disappear out of a woman
in a few days; but they belonged chiefly to one side of a nature that
had two very distinct sides. There was the 'lady' side, and there was
the 'actress' side; and unfortunately, thought Logotheti, there was now
no longer the slightest doubt as to which was the stronger. Margaret
Donne was already a memory; the reality was 'Cordova,' who was going to
have a fabulous success and would soon be one of the most successful
lyric sopranos of her time.