Star-Dust Part 71

It seemed to Lilly, at the sound of that voice, not yet cleared of childish treble, but as ready to rise as a lark, that every ounce of her blood must be gushing against her throat; so, after it was finished, she sat on quite dumbly, staring at the manner in which Trieste remained sitting with his eyes closed.

"Lyric soprano," he said, finally. "Fine! Big! G.o.d-given!"

"_Maestro_--you mean that?"

"Heigh-ho!" he said on a sigh, walking over and placing his hand on Zoe's curls. "I make up my mind I am seeck of this business. I wait only for this war to live my day quietly in Capri, where I have my _casa_, and now a new nightingale flies in at my window. Twice now. Ten years ago comes Carrienta out of just such a clear sky, and once more, when I am again sure that one voice is only more unmusical than the rest, comes this--"

Standing there, Lilly was fighting an impulse to faint. She remembered, with terror, previous sensations, and fought off the vertigo, biting down into her lips. She wanted to smile, but her mouth felt numb, as if it dragged instead of lifted.

"You--you make us very happy--_maestro_."

"Some day," cried Zoe, still thrilling from her effort, "I will sing until my high C hits the sky!"

'I think you will, _bella mia_, if you have in you the power to work for it."

"I have."

"Art is the most cruel paymaster in the world. It exacts full recompense, toil, and heartache before it deals out a first payment in success."

"I'll pay! I'll pay for what I want, and most of all I want to sing!"

She trilled up a brace of scales for him then, and there were minute questions of health and habits, and, finally, in a waiting pause, Lilly found word to ask the question against which her lips stiffened.

"What--are--your terms--_maestro_?"

Something strange happened then, his well-known ac.u.men immediately a.s.serting itself. It was as if he had slipped into another personality.

"Fifteen dollars a lesson. She must have three a week and her school work and other studies should be reduced."

"Lilly--we're too poor for that!"

"I--I'm afraid my little girl is right, _maestro_. I--I couldn't even pay that for all three. I'm employed myself, you see."

"Oh," he said, and walked off to the window, dilly-dallying on his heels and looking out.

Finally he turned, with a gesture of dismissal.

"I have never before, except Carrienta, done such a thing. It must be a secret between us. My belief is that art should be as well paid as any life work, whether it is dentistry or lawmaking or storekeeping. But your child here--they do not come so every day. In ten years, with hundreds of pupils each year, she is the greatest since Carrienta. But I must have first right to her. You hear, first right! I will teach her free of charge. Leave your name and address with my secretary as you go out. Send her Monday at four. Loose clothing. Not even corset waists.

Good afternoon. Good-by--Zoe"--placing his hands on her curls as if for their warmth.

In the room adjoining, under whisper of a very soft pedal, some one, probably a waiting pupil, was playing the indomitable pianoforte composition, "Melody in F." Staring at her daughter, an old conceit of Lilly's girlhood came flowing back. It seemed to her that a proscenium arch of music was forming over Zoe and that her voice, a high-flung scarf of melody, was winding itself reverently round a star.

That afternoon, Bruce Visigoth again asked Lilly to marry him.

Taking advantage of the quiet of a Sat.u.r.day afternoon half holiday, she had returned to the office to clear her desk of an acc.u.mulation of loose ends.

In spite of herself, an extraordinary depression, low as storm clouds, was gathering over the excitation whipped up by Trieste's acceptance of Zoe.

The tight squeeze of a lump was gathering in her throat. Finally she laid her cheek to the desk and cried a little pool of her unaccountable melancholy on to the gla.s.sed surface.

Bruce Visigoth found her so, although, at his entrance, she sprang from the mound of her misery, violently simulating affairs at a lower drawer.

"h.e.l.lo!" he cried, then, eying her crumpled cheek and the lane of tears: "Ah, I say now! Come, come; this won't do. What's up?"

She rubbed her bare hand furiously across the ravages of her sharp depression.

"Nothing. I--I guess I'm blue," she said, in a half laugh. "Something wonderful has happened to Zoe, and I--it's made me so happy, I'm blue.

That's it--so--happy--I'm blue."

"What is the wonderful thing?"

She told him.

It was then he caught her hands.

"Lilly, marry me! Make it possible! Don't let the years lead you into a blind alley. You are bound inevitably to lose a child like Zoe--to life.

That's why you are so unaccountably blue, Lilly; the writing is on the wall."

"No!" she cried, plunging past him, her hat in hand and her throat now a cave of the winds for her unreleased sobs. "The years have brought me, Zoe. She is my fulfillment. You can't frighten me--life cannot take her from me. I'm not afraid--only, I can't bear anything to-night, least of all from you--"

"Lilly, you're not--"

"Let me go! I'm all right--only tired--that's all.

Terribly--terribly--tired."

She was presently on her homeward way, walking swiftly, almost, it would seem, a little madly, through a May evening that hung as thinly as one thickness of a veil.

At Seventy-second Street she veered suddenly and rather unaccountably to Riverside Drive and down into a ledge of park that dips like a terrace to the Hudson River.

An asphalt walk led in festoons from high parky nooks that sheltered couples, down to the water-slapped edge of docks, where the tidey surf had a thick, inarticulate lisp, as if what it had to say might only be comprehended from the under side.

At one of the lowermost curves of the walk, the width of a brace of railroad tracks between, a coal dock jutted out into the river. Across these forbidden tracks, indeed, as if they did not exist, Lilly wandered.

At the last inch of dock, so that the water licked up at her shoes, Lilly stood poised. Not, it is true, with the diver's blade thrust of arms, but rather the unskilled, the indeterminate movement of one vaguely prompted from the unfathomable places of the heart.

It was upon that move that something, a terrifying restraint, laid hold of Lilly's jangling nerve ends.

"Hey there! None o' that to-night!"

A dockman's hand, hairy as an Airedale, had her by the arm, and somewhere at her brow, cooling it, the fine hand of Bruce Visigoth, pressing her against him, and at that touch Lilly's hysteria shot up like a geyser.

"Don't!" she screamed, and would have struggled for the edge except for the two firm hands now pressing her arms to her sides.

"Lilly, for G.o.d's sake, get hold of yourself!"

"Let me go! Let me go!"