George Meredith
Vittoria. Complete
CHAPTER XIX
THE PRIMA DONNA
‘Whover is in my box is my guest,’ said the countess, adding a convulsive imperative pressure on Carlo’s arm, to aid the meaning of her deep underbreath. She was a woman who rarely exacted obedience, and she was spontaneously obeyed. No questions could be put, no explanations given in the crash, and they threaded on amid numerous greetings in a place where Milanese society had habitually ceased to gather, and found itself now in assembly with unconcealed sensations of strangeness. A card lay on the table of the countess’s private retiring-room: it bore the name of General Pierson. She threw off her black lace scarf. ‘Angelo Guidascarpi is in Milan,’ she said. ‘He has killed one of the Lenkensteins, sword to sword. He came to me an hour after you left; the sbirri were on his track; he passed for my son. He is now under the charge of Barto Rizzo, disguised; probably in this house. His brother is in the city. Keep the cowl on your head as long as possible; if these hounds see and identify you, there will be mischief.’ She said no more, satisfied that she was understood, but opening the door of the box, passed in, and returned a stately acknowledgement of the salutations of two military officers. Carlo likewise bent his head to them; it was like bending his knee, for in the younger of the two intruders he recognized Lieutenant Pierson. The countess accepted a vacated seat; the cavity of her ear accepted the General’s apologies. He informed her that he deeply regretted the intrusion; he was under orders to be present at the opera, and to be as near the stage as possible, the countess’s box being designated. Her face had the unalterable composure of a painted head upon an old canvas. The General persisted in tendering excuses. She replied, ‘It is best, when one is too weak to resist, to submit to an outrage quietly.’ General Pierson at once took the position assigned to him; it was not an agreeable one. Between Carlo and the lieutenant no attempt at conversation was made.
The General addressed his nephew in English. ‘Did you see the girl behind the scenes, Wilfrid?’
The answer was ‘No.’
‘Pericles has her fast shut up in the Tyrol: the best habitat for her if she objects to a whipping. Did you see Irma?’
‘No; she has disappeared too.’
‘Then I suppose we must make up our minds to an opera without head or tail. As Pat said of the sack of potatoes, “‘twould be a mighty fine beast if it had them.”’
The officers had taken refuge in their opera-glasses, and spoke while gazing round the house.
‘If neither this girl nor Irma is going to appear, there is no positive necessity for my presence here,’ said the General, reduced to excuse himself to himself. ‘I’ll sit through the first scene and then beat a retreat. I might be off at once; the affair looks harmless enough only, you know, when there’s nothing to see, you must report that you have seen it, or your superiors are not satisfied.’
The lieutenant was less able to cover the irksomeness of his situation with easy talk. His glance rested on Countess Len a von Lenkenstein, a quick motion of whose hand made him say that he should go over to her.
‘Very well,’ said the General; ‘be careful that you give no hint of this horrible business. They will hear of it when they get home: time enough!’
Lieutenant Pierson touched at his sister’s box on the way. She was very excited, asked innumerable things,—whether there was danger? whether he had a whole regiment at hand to protect peaceable persons? ‘Otherwise,’ she said, ‘I shall not be able to keep that man (her husband) in Italy another week. He refused to stir out to-night, though we know that nothing can happen. Your prima donna celestissima is out of harm’s way.’
‘Oh, she is safe,—ze minx’; cried Antonio-Pericles, laughing and saluting the Duchess of Graatli, who presented herself at the front of her box. Major de Pyrmont was behind her, and it delighted the Greek to point them out to the English lady, with a simple intimation of the character of their relationship, at which her curls shook sadly.
‘Pardon, madame,’ said Pericles. ‘In Italy, a husband away, ze friend takes title: it is no more.’
‘It is very disgraceful,’ she said.
‘Ze morales, madame, suit ze sun.’
Captain Gambier left the box with Wilfrid, expressing in one sentence his desire to fling Pericles over to the pit, and in another his belief that an English friend, named Merthyr Powys, was in the house.
‘He won’t be in the city four-and-twenty hours,’ said Wilfrid.
‘Well; you’ll keep your tongue silent.’
‘By heavens! Gambier, if you knew the insults we have to submit to! The temper of angels couldn’t stand it. I’m sorry enough for these fellows, with their confounded country, but it’s desperate work to be civil to them; upon my honour, it is! I wish they would stand up and let us have it over. We have to bear more from the women than the men.’
‘I leave you to cool,’ said Gambier.
The delayed absence of the maestro from his post at the head of the orchestra, where the musicians sat awaiting him, seemed to confirm a rumour that was now circling among the audience, warning all to prepare for a disappointment. His baton was brought in and laid on the book of the new overture. When at last he was seen bearing onward through the music-stands, a low murmur ran round. Rocco paid no heed to it. His demeanour produced such satisfaction in the breast of Antonio-Pericles that he rose, and was guilty of the barbarism of clapping his hands. Meeting Ammiani in the lobby, he said, ‘Come, my good friend, you shall help me to pull Irma through to-night. She is vinegar—we will mix her with oil. It is only for to-night, to save that poor Rocco’s opera.’
‘Irma!’ said Ammiani; ‘she is by this time in Tyrol. Your Irma will have some difficulty in showing herself here within sixty hours.’
‘How!’ cried Pericles, amazed, and plucking after Carlo to stop him. ‘I bet you—’
‘How much?’
‘I bet you a thousand florins you do not see la Vittoria to-night.’
‘Good. I bet you a thousand florins you do not see Irma.’
‘No Vittoria, I say!’
‘And I say, no Lazzeruola!’
Agostino, who was pacing the lobby, sent Pericles distraught with the same tale of the rape of Irma. He rushed to Signora Piaveni’s box and heard it repeated. There he beheld, sitting in the background, an old English acquaintance, with whom Captain Gambier was conversing.
‘My dear Powys, you have come all the way from England to see your favourite’s first night. You will be shocked, sir. She has neglected her Art. She is exiled, banished, sent away to study and to compose her mind.’
‘I think you are mistaken,’ said Laura. ‘You will see her almost immediately.’
‘Signora, pardon me; do I not know best?’
‘You may have contrived badly.’
Pericles blinked and gnawed his moustache as if it were food for patience.
‘I would wager a milliard of francs,’ he muttered. With absolute pathos he related to Mr. Powys the aberrations of the divinely-gifted voice, the wreck which Vittoria strove to become, and from which he alone was striving to rescue her. He used abundant illustrations, coarse and quaint, and was half hysterical; flashing a white fist and thumping the long projection of his knee with a wolfish aspect. His grotesque sincerity was little short of the shedding of tears.
‘And your sister, my dear Powys?’ he asked, as one returning to the consideration of shadows.
‘My sister accompanies me, but not to the opera.’
‘For another campaign—hein?’
‘To winter in Italy, at all events.’
Carlo Ammiani entered and embraced Merthyr Powys warmly. The Englishman was at home among Italians: Pericles, feeling that he was not so, and regarding them all as a community of fever-patients without hospital, retired. To his mind it was the vilest treason, the grossest selfishness, to conspire or to wink at the sacrifice of a voice like Vittoria’s to such a temporal matter as this, which they called patriotism. He looked on it as one might look on the Hindoo drama of a Suttee. He saw in it just that stupid action of a whole body of fanatics combined to precipitate the devotion of a precious thing to extinction. And worse; for life was common, and women and Hindoo widows were common; but a Vittorian voice was but one in a generation—in a cycle of years. The religious belief of the connoisseur extended to the devout conception that her voice was a spiritual endowment, the casting of which priceless jewel into the bloody ditch of patriots was far more tragic and lamentable than any disastrous concourse of dedicated lives. He shook the lobby with his tread, thinking of the great night this might have been but for Vittoria’s madness. The overture was coming to an end. By tightening his arms across his chest he gained some outward composure, and fixed his eyes upon the stage.
While sitting with Laura Piaveni and Merthyr Powys, Ammiani saw the apparition of Captain Weisspriess in his mother’s box. He forgot her injunction, and hurried to her side, leaving the doors open. His passion of anger spurned her admonishing grasp of his arm, and with his glove he smote the Austrian officer on the face. Weisspriess plucked his sword out; the house rose; there was a moment like that of a wild beast’s show of teeth. It passed: Captain Weisspriess withdrew in obedience to General Pierson’s command. The latter wrote on a slip of paper that two pieces of artillery should be placed in position, and a squad of men about the doors: he handed it out to Weisspriess.
‘I hope,’ the General said to Carlo, ‘we shall be able to arrange things for you without the interposition of the authorities.’
Carlo rejoined, ‘General, he has the blood of our family on his hands. I am ready.’
The General bowed. He glanced at the countess for a sign of maternal weakness, saw none, and understood that a duel was down in the morrow’s bill of entertainments, as well as a riot possibly before dawn. The house had revealed its temper in that short outburst, as a quivering of quick lightning-flame betrays the forehead of the storm.
Countess Ammiani bade her son make fast the outer door. Her sedate energies could barely control her agitation. In helping Angelo Guidascarpi to evade the law, she had imperilled her son and herself. Many of the Bolognese sbirri were in pursuit of Angelo. Some knew his person; some did not; but if those two before whom she had identified Angelo as being her son Carlo chanced now to be in the house, and to have seen him, and heard his name, the risks were great and various.
‘Do you know that handsome young Count Ammiani?’ Countess Lena said to Wilfrid. ‘Perhaps you do not think him handsome? He was for a short time a play-fellow of mine. He is more passionate than I am, and that does not say a little; I warn you! Look how excited he is. No wonder. He is—everybody knows it—he is la Vittoria’s lover.’
Countess Lena uttered that sentence in Italian. The soft tongue sent it like a coiling serpent through Wilfrid’s veins. In English or in German it would not have possessed the deadly meaning.
She may have done it purposely, for she and her sister Countess Anna studied his face. The lifting of the curtain drew all eyes to the stage.
Rocco Ricci’s baton struck for the opening of one of his spirited choruses; a chorus of villagers, who sing to the burden that Happiness, the aim of all humanity, has promised to visit the earth this day, that she may witness the union of the noble lovers, Camillo and Camilla. Then a shepherd sings a verse, with his hand stretched out to the impending castle. There lives Count Orso: will he permit their festivities to pass undisturbed? The puling voice is crushed by the chorus, which protests that the heavens are above Count Orso. But another villager tells of Orso’s power, and hints at his misdeeds. The chorus rises in reply, warning all that Count Orso has ears wherever three are congregated; the villagers break apart and eye one another distrustfully, reuniting to the song of Happiness before they disperse. Camillo enters solus. Montini, as Camillo, enjoyed a warm reception; but as he advanced to deliver his canzone, it was seen that he and Rocco interchanged glances of desperate resignation. Camillo has had love passages with Michiella, Count Orso’s daughter, and does not hesitate to declare that he dreads her. The orphan Camilla, who has been reared in yonder castle with her, as her sister, is in danger during all these last minutes which still retain her from his arms.
‘If I should never see her—I who, like a poor ghost upon the shores of the dead river, have been flattered with the thought that she would fall upon my breast like a ray of the light of Elysium—if I should never see her more!’ The famous tenore threw his whole force into that outcry of projected despair, and the house was moved by it: there were many in the house who shared his apprehension of a foul mischance.
Thenceforward the opera and the Italian audience were as one. All that was uttered had a meaning, and was sympathetically translated. Camilla they perceived to be a grave burlesque with a core to it. The quick-witted Italians caught up the interpretation in a flash. ‘Count Orso’ Austria; ‘Michiella’ is Austria’s spirit of intrigue; ‘Camillo’ is indolent Italy, amorous Italy, Italy aimless; ‘Camilla’ is YOUNG ITALY!
Their eagerness for sight of Vittoria was now red-hot, and when Camillo exclaimed ‘She comes!’ many rose from their seats.
A scrap of paper was handed to Antonio-Pericles from Captain Weisspriess, saying briefly that he had found Irma in the carriage instead of the little ‘v,’ thanked him for the joke, and had brought her back. Pericles was therefore not surprised when Irma, as Michiella, came on, breathless, and looking in an excitement of anger; he knew that he had been tricked.
Between Camillo and Michiella a scene of some vivacity ensued—reproaches, threats of calamity, offers of returning endearment upon her part; a display of courtly scorn upon his. Irma made her voice claw at her quondam lover very finely; it was a voice with claws, that entered the hearing sharp-edged, and left it plucking at its repose. She was applauded relishingly when, after vainly wooing him, she turned aside and said—
‘What change is this in one who like a reed
Bent to my twisting hands? Does he recoil?
Is this the hound whom I have used to feed
With sops of vinegar and sops of oil?’
Michiella’s further communications to the audience make it known that she has allowed the progress toward the ceremonies of espousal between Camillo and Camilla, in order, at the last moment, to show her power over the youth and to plunge the detested Camilla into shame and wretchedness.
Camillo retires: Count Orso appears. There is a duet between father and daughter: she confesses her passion for Camillo, and entreats her father to stop the ceremony; and here the justice of the feelings of Italians, even in their heat of blood, was noteworthy. Count Orso says that he would willingly gratify his daughter, as it would gratify himself, but that he must respect the law. ‘The law is of your own making,’ says Michiella. ‘Then, the more must I respect it,’ Count Orso replies.
The audience gave Austria credit for that much in a short murmur.
Michiella’s aside, ‘Till anger seizes him I wait!’ created laughter; it came in contrast with an extraordinary pomposity of self-satisfaction exhibited by Count Orso—the flower-faced, tun-bellied basso, Lebruno. It was irresistible. He stood swollen out like a morning cock. To make it further telling, he took off his yellow bonnet with a black-gloved hand, and thumped the significant colours prominently on his immense chest—an idea, not of Agostino’s, but Lebruno’s own; and Agostino cursed with fury. Both he and Rocco knew that their joint labour would probably have only one night’s display of existence in the Austrian dominions, but they grudged to Lebruno the chief merit of despatching it to the Shades.
The villagers are heard approaching. ‘My father!’ cries Michiella, distractedly; ‘the hour is near: it will be death to your daughter! Imprison Camillo: I can bring twenty witnesses to prove that he has sworn you are illegally the lord of this country. You will rue the marriage. Do as you once did. Be bold in time. The arrow-head is on the string-cut the string!’
‘As I once did?’ replies Orso with frown terrific, like a black crest. He turns broadly and receives the chorus of countrymen in paternal fashion—an admirably acted bit of grave burlesque.
By this time the German portion of the audience had, by one or other of the senses, dimly divined that the opera was a shadow of something concealed—thanks to the buffo-basso Lebruno. Doubtless they would have seen this before, but that the Austrian censorship had seemed so absolute a safeguard.
‘My children! all are my children in this my gladsome realm!’ Count Orso says, and marches forth, after receiving the compliment of a choric song in honour of his paternal government. Michiella follows him.
Then came the deep suspension of breath. For, as upon the midnight you count bell-note after bell-note of the toiling hour, and know not in the darkness whether there shall be one beyond it, so that you hang over an abysm until Twelve is sounded, audience and actors gazed with equal expectation at the path winding round from the castle, waiting for the voice of the new prima donna.
‘Mia madre!’ It issued tremblingly faint. None could say who was to appear.
Rocco Ricci struck twice with his baton, flung a radiant glance across his shoulders for all friends, and there was joy in the house. Vittoria stood before them.
CHAPTER XX
THE OPERA OF CAMILLA
She was dressed like a noble damsel from the hands of Titian. An Italian audience cannot but be critical in their first glance at a prima donna, for they are asked to do homage to a queen who is to be taken on her merits: all that they have heard and have been taught to expect of her is compared swiftly with the observation of her appearance and her manner. She is crucially examined to discover defects. There is no boisterous loyalty at the outset. And as it was now evident that Vittoria had chosen to impersonate a significant character, her indications of method were jealously watched for a sign of inequality, either in her, motion, or the force of her eyes. So silent a reception might have seemed cruel in any other case; though in all cases the candidate for laurels must, in common with the criminal, go through the ordeal of justification. Men do not heartily bow their heads until they have subjected the aspirant to some personal contest, and find themselves overmatched. The senses, ready to become so slavish in adulation and delight, are at the beginning more exacting than the judgement, more imperious than the will. A figure in amber and pale blue silk was seen, such as the great Venetian might have sketched from his windows on a day when the Doge went forth to wed the Adriatic a superb Italian head, with dark banded hair-braid, and dark strong eyes under unabashed soft eyelids! She moved as, after long gazing at a painting of a fair woman, we may have the vision of her moving from the frame. It was an animated picture of ideal Italia. The sea of heads right up to the highest walls fronted her glistening, and she was mute as moonrise. A virgin who loosens a dove from her bosom does it with no greater effort than Vittoria gave out her voice. The white bird flutters rapidly; it circles and takes its flight. The voice seemed to be as little the singer’s own.
The theme was as follows:—Camilla has dreamed overnight that her lost mother came to her bedside to bless her nuptials. Her mother was folded in a black shroud, looking formless as death, like very death, save that death sheds no tears. She wept, without change of voice, or mortal shuddering, like one whose nature weeps: ‘And with the forth-flowing of her tears the knowledge of her features was revealed to me.’ Behold the Adige, the Mincio, Tiber, and the Po!—such great rivers were the tears pouring from her eyes. She threw apart the shroud: her breasts and her limbs were smooth and firm as those of an immortal Goddess: but breasts and limbs showed the cruel handwriting of base men upon the body of a martyred saint. The blood from those deep gashes sprang out at intervals, mingling with her tears. She said:
‘My child! were I a Goddess, my wounds would heal. Were I a Saint, I should be in Paradise. I am no Goddess, and no Saint: yet I cannot die. My wounds flow and my tears. My tears flow because of no fleshly anguish: I pardon my enemies. My blood flows from my body, my tears from my soul. They flow to wash out my shame. I have to expiate my soul’s shame by my body’s shame. Oh! how shall I tell you what it is to walk among my children unknown of them, though each day I bear the sun abroad like my beating heart; each night the moon, like a heart with no blood in it. Sun and moon they see, but not me! They know not their mother. I cry to God. The answer of our God is this:—“Give to thy children one by one to drink of thy mingled tears and blood:—then, if there is virtue in them, they shall revive, thou shaft revive. If virtue is not in them, they and thou shall continue prostrate, and the ox shall walk over you.” From heaven’s high altar, O Camilla, my child, this silver sacramental cup was reached to me. Gather my tears in it, fill it with my blood, and drink.’
The song had been massive in monotones, almost Gregorian in its severity up to this point.
‘I took the cup. I looked my mother in the face. I filled the cup from the flowing of her tears, the flowing of her blood; and I drank!’
Vittoria sent this last phrase ringing out forcefully. From the inveterate contralto of the interview, she rose to pure soprano in describing her own action. ‘And I drank,’ was given on a descent of the voice: the last note was in the minor key—it held the ear as if more must follow: like a wail after a triumph of resolve. It was a masterpiece of audacious dramatic musical genius addressed with sagacious cunning and courage to the sympathizing audience present. The supposed incompleteness kept them listening; the intentness sent that last falling (as it were, broken) note travelling awakeningly through their minds. It is the effect of the minor key to stir the hearts of men with this particular suggestiveness. The house rose, Italians—and Germans together. Genius, music, and enthusiasm break the line of nationalities. A rain of nosegays fell about Vittoria; evvivas, bravas, shouts—all the outcries of delirious men surrounded her. Men and women, even among the hardened chorus, shook together and sobbed. ‘Agostino!’ and ‘Rocco!’ were called; ‘Vittoria!’ ‘Vittoria!’ above all, with increasing thunder, like a storm rushing down a valley, striking in broad volume from rock to rock, humming remote, and bursting up again in the face of the vale. Her name was sung over and over—‘Vittoria! Vittoria!’ as if the mouths were enamoured of it.
‘Evviva la Vittoria a d’ Italia!’ was sung out from the body of the house.
An echo replied—‘"Italia a il premio della VITTORIA!”’ a well-known saying gloriously adapted, gloriously rescued from disgrace.
But the object and source of the tremendous frenzy stood like one frozen by the revelation of the magic the secret of which she has studiously mastered. A nosegay, the last of the tributary shower, discharged from a distance, fell at her feet. She gave it unconsciously preference over the rest, and picked it up. A little paper was fixed in the centre. She opened it with a mechanical hand, thinking there might be patriotic orders enclosed for her. It was a cheque for one thousand guineas, drawn upon an English banker by the hand of Antonio-Pericles Agriolopoulos; freshly drawn; the ink was only half dried, showing signs of the dictates of a furious impulse. This dash of solid prose, and its convincing proof that her Art had been successful, restored Vittoria’s composure, though not her early statuesque simplicity. Rocco gave an inquiring look to see if she would repeat the song. She shook her head resolutely. Her opening of the paper in the bouquet had quieted the general ebullition, and the expression of her wish being seen, the chorus was permitted to usurp her place. Agostino paced up and down the lobby, fearful that he had been guilty of leading her to anticlimax.
He met Antonio-Pericles, and told him so; adding (for now the mask had been seen through, and was useless any further) that he had not had the heart to put back that vision of Camilla’s mother to a later scene, lest an interruption should come which would altogether preclude its being heard. Pericles affected disdain of any success which Vittoria had yet achieved. ‘Wait for Act the Third,’ he said; but his irritable anxiousness to hold intercourse with every one, patriot or critic, German, English, or Italian, betrayed what agitation of exultation coursed in his veins. ‘Aha!’ was his commencement of a greeting; ‘was Antonio-Pericles wrong when he told you that he had a prima donna for you to amaze all Christendom, and whose notes were safe and firm as the footing of the angels up and down Jacob’s ladder, my friends? Aha!’
‘Do you see that your uncle is signalling to you?’ Countess Lena said to Wilfrid. He answered like a man in a mist, and looked neither at her nor at the General, who, in default of his obedience to gestures, came good-humouredly to the box, bringing Captain Weisspriess with him.
‘We ‘re assisting at a pretty show,’ he said.
‘I am in love with her voice,’ said Countess Anna.
‘Ay; if it were only a matter of voices, countess.’
‘I think that these good people require a trouncing,’ said Captain Weisspriess.
‘Lieutenant Pierson is not of your opinion,’ Countess Anna remarked. Hearing his own name, Wilfrid turned to them with a weariness well acted, but insufficiently to a jealous observation, for his eyes were quick under the carelessly-dropped eyelids, and ranged keenly over the stage while they were affecting to assist his fluent tongue.
Countess Lena levelled her opera-glass at Carlo Ammiani, and then placed the glass in her sister’s hand. Wilfrid drank deep of bitterness. ‘That is Vittoria’s lover,’ he thought; ‘the lover of the Emilia who once loved me!’
General Pierson may have noticed this by-play: he said to his nephew in the brief military tone: ‘Go out; see that the whole regiment is handy about the house; station a dozen men, with a serjeant, at each of the backdoors, and remain below. I very much mistake, or we shall have to make a capture of this little woman to-night.’
‘How on earth,’ he resumed, while Wilfrid rose savagely and went out with his stiffest bow, ‘this opera was permitted to appear, I can’t guess! A child could see through it. The stupidity of our civil authorities passes my understanding—it’s a miracle! We have stringent orders not to take any initiative, or I would stop the Fraulein Camilla from uttering another note.’
‘If you did that, I should be angry with you, General,’ said Countess Anna.
‘And I also think the Government cannot do wrong,’ Countess Lena joined in.
The General contented himself by saying: ‘Well, we shall see.’
Countess Lena talked to Captain Weisspriess in an undertone, referring to what she called his dispute with Carlo Ammiani. The captain was extremely playful in rejoinders.
‘You iron man!’ she exclaimed.
‘Man of steel would be the better phrase,’ her sister whispered.
‘It will be an assassination, if it happens.’
‘No officer can bear with an open insult, Lena.’
‘I shall not sit and see harm done to my old playmate, Anna.’
‘Beware of betraying yourself for one who detests you.’
A grand duo between Montini and Vittoria silenced all converse. Camilla tells Camillo of her dream. He pledges his oath to discover her mother, if alive; if dead, to avenge her. Camilla says she believes her mother is in the dungeons of Count Orso’s castle. The duo tasked Vittoria’s execution of florid passages; it gave evidence of her sound artistic powers.
‘I was a fool,’ thought Antonio-Pericles; ‘I flung my bouquet with the herd. I was a fool! I lost my head!’
He tapped angrily at the little ink-flask in his coat-pocket. The first act, after scenes between false Camillo and Michiella, ends with the marriage of Camillo and Camilla;—a quatuor composed of Montini, Vittoria, Irma, and Lebruno. Michiella is in despair; Count Orso is profoundly sonorous with paternity and devotion to the law. He has restored to Camilla a portion of her mother’s sequestrated estates. A portion of the remainder will be handed over to her when he has had experience of her husband’s good behaviour. The rest he considers legally his own by right of (Treaties), and by right of possession and documents his sword. Yonder castle he must keep. It is the key of all his other territories. Without it, his position will be insecure. (Allusion to the Austrian argument that the plains of Lombardy are the strategic defensive lines of the Alps.)
Agostino, pursued by his terror of anticlimax, ran from the sight of Vittoria when she was called, after the fall of the curtain. He made his way to Rocco Ricci (who had given his bow to the public from his perch), and found the maestro drinking Asti to counteract his natural excitement. Rocco told Agostino, that up to the last moment, neither he nor any soul behind the scenes knew Vittoria would be able to appear, except that she had sent a note to him with a pledge to be in readiness for the call. Irma had come flying in late, enraged, and in disorder, praying to take Camilla’s part; but Montini refused to act with the seconda donna as prima donna. They had commenced the opera in uncertainty whether it could go on beyond the situation where Camilla presents herself. ‘I was prepared to throw up my baton,’ said Rocco, ‘and publicly to charge the Government with the rape of our prima donna. Irma I was ready to replace. I could have filled that gap.’ He spoke of Vittoria’s triumph. Agostino’s face darkened. ‘Ha!’ said he, ‘provided we don’t fall flat, like your Asti with the cork out. I should have preferred an enthusiasm a trifle more progressive. The notion of travelling backwards is upon me forcibly, after that tempest of acclamation.’
