The result fully justified Hawberk’s confidence. There were two principal ladies in the opera—the patrician heroine, written for a light soprano, and the gutter heroine, a mezzo soprano, whose music made a greater call upon the singer than the former character, which had been written especially for the Apollo’s established prima donna, a lady with a charming birdlike voice, flexible and brilliant, but a little worn with six years’ constant service, and a handsome face which was somewhat the worse for those six years in a London theatre. There could have been no greater contrast to Miss Emmeline Danby, with her sharp nose, blonde hair, sylphlike figure and canary-bird voice, than this daughter of St. Mark, whose splendour of colouring and fullness of form seemed in perfect harmony with the power and compass of her voice. The town, without being tired of Miss Danby, was at once caught and charmed by this new singer. Her blue-black hair and flashing eyes, her easy movements, her broken English, her girlish laughter, were all new to the audience of the Apollo, who hitherto had been called upon to applaud only the highest training of voice and person. Here was a girl who, like the character she represented, had evidently sprung from the proletariat, and who came dancing on to the London stage, fresh, fearless, unsophisticated, secure of the friendly feeling of her audience, and giving full scope to her natural gaiety of heart.
Signora Vivanti’s personality was a new sensation; and to a blasé London public there is nothing so precious as a new sensation. Signor Zinco proved a true prophet. That touch of vulgarity which he had spoken of deprecatingly to Vansittart had made Lisa’s fortune. Had she come straight from the Milan Conservatorio, cultivated to the highest pitch, approved by Verdi himself, she would hardly have succeeded as she had done, with all the rough edges of her grand voice unpolished, and all the little caprices and impertinences of a daughter of the people unchastened and unrestrained.
Lisa took the town by storm, and “Fanchonette,” in her little mob cap and striped petticoat, appeared on half the matchboxes that were sold by the London tobacconists; and “Fanchonette,” with every imaginable turn of head and shoulder, smiled in the windows of the Stereoscopic Company, and of all the fashionable stationers.
Among the many who admired the new singer one of the most enthusiastic was Wilfred Sefton, who generally spent a week or two of the early winter in his bachelor quarters at Chelsea, for the express purpose of seeing the new productions at the fashionable theatres, and of dining with his chosen friends.
Sefton was passionately fond of music, and knew more about it than is known to most country gentlemen. The loftiest classical school was not too high or too serious for him; and the lightest opera bouffe was not too low. He had a taste sufficiently catholic to range from Wagner to Offenbach. He was a profound believer in Sullivan, and he had a warm affection for Massenet.
Fanchonette was by far the cleverest opera which Mervyn Hawberk had written; and Sefton was at the Apollo on the opening night, charmed with the music, and amused by the new singer. He went a second, a third, a fourth time during his fortnight in town; and the oftener he heard the music the better he liked it; and the oftener he saw Signora Vivanti the more vividly was he impressed by her undisciplined graces of person and manner. She had just that spontaneity which had ever exercised the strongest influence over his mind and fancy. He had passed unmoved through the furnace of the best society, had danced and flirted, and had been on the best possible terms with some of the handsomest women in London, and had yet remained heart-whole. He had never been so near falling in love in all seriousness as with Eve Marchant; and Eve’s chief charm had been her frank girlishness, her unsophisticated delight in life.
Well, he was cured of his passion for Eve, cured by that cold douche of indifference which the young lady had poured upon him; cured by the feeling of angry scorn which had been evoked by her preference for Vansittart; for a man who, in worldly position, in good looks, and in culture, Wilfred Sefton regarded as his inferior. He could not go on caring for a young woman who had shown herself so deficient in taste as not to prefer the dubious advances of a Sefton to the honest love of a Vansittart. He dismissed Eve from his thoughts for the time being; but not without prophetic musings upon a day when she might be wearied of her commonplace husband, and more appreciative of Mr. Sefton’s finer qualities of intellect and person. He was thus in a measure fancy free as he lolled in his stall at the Apollo, and listened approvingly to Lisa’s full and bell-like tones in the quartette, which was already being
