Three years and more had passed since Will’s visit to the Tyrol. Events had moved fast for his fortunes meanwhile. He was a well-known man now in theatrical circles. Florian Wood went about, indeed, boasting in clubs and drawing-rooms that ’twas he who had discovered and brought out Will Deverill. “It’s all very well to be a poet,” he said, “and it’s all very well to be born with a head full of rhymes and tunes, of crochets, clefs, and quavers; but what’s the use of all that, I ask you my dear fellow, without a critic to push you? A Critic is a man with a fine eye for potentialities. Before the world sees, he sees; before the world hears, he listens. He sits by the world’s wayside, as it were, with open eye or ear, and catches unawares the first faint lisping notes of undeveloped genius. He divines in the bud the exquisite aroma and perfect hue of the full-blown blossom. Long ago, I said to Deverill, ‘You have the power within you to write a good opera!’ He laughed me to scorn; but I said to him, ‘Try!’?—?and the outcome was, Honeysuckle. He took up a battered fiddle one day at an old inn in the Zillerthal, when we two were rusticating on the emerald bosom of those charming unsophisticated Tyrolese valleys; he struck a few notes on it of his own composing; and I said to him, ‘My dear Will, Sullivan trembles on his pedestal.’ At the time he treated it as a mere passing joke; but I made him persevere; and what was the result??—?why, those exquisite airs which found their way before long to the sheep-runs of Australia, and resounded from lumberers’ camps in the backwoods of Canada! The Critic, I say, is the true prophet and sage of our modern world; he sees what is to be, and he helps to produce it.”
But whether Florian was right in attributing Will’s success to himself or not, it is certain, at least, that Will was rapidly successful. The world recognised in him a certain genuine poetical vein which has seldom been vouchsafed to the English librettist; it recognised in him, also, a certain depth and intensity of musical sense which has seldom been vouchsafed to the English dramatic composer.
One afternoon that spring, Will returned to town from a visit to the Provinces in connection with his new opera, The Lady of Llandudno, then about to be performed in several country theatres by Mr D’Arcy Clift’s operatic company. He drove almost straight from the station to Rue’s. Florian was there in great form; and Mr Joaquin Holmes, the Colorado Seer, had dropped in for afternoon tea at his fair disciple’s. In spite of Will’s ridicule, Rue continued to believe in Mr Holmes’ thought-reading and other manifestions. For the Seer had added by this time a touch of spiritualism to the general attractions of his flagging entertainments at the Assyrian Hall; and it is a mysterious dispensation of Providence that wealthy Americans, especially widows, fall a natural prey to all forms of transcendentalism or spiritualistic quackery. It seems to be one of the strange devices which Providence adopts for putting excessive or monopolised wealth into circulation.
“Mr Holmes wants me to go to the Harmony to-night,” Rue said, with a smile?—?“you know what it is?—?the new Harmony Theatre. He says there’s a piece coming out there this evening I ought to see?—?a pretty new piece by an American composer. You’re going to be crushed, Will. They’ve got a fresh tenor there, a very good man, whom Mr Holmes thinks a deal of. I’ve half a mind to go; will you join our party?”
“You ought to hear it,” the Seer remarked, with his oracular air, turning to Will, and looking critical. “This new tenor’s a person you should keep your eye upon; I heard him rehearse, and I said to myself at once, ‘That fellow’s the very man Mr Deverill will want to write a first part for; if he doesn’t, I’ll retire at once from the prophetic business.’ He has a magnificent voice; you should get Blades to secure him next season for the Duke of Edinburgh’s. He’s worth fifty pounds a night, if he’s worth a penny.”
“Very good trade, a tenor’s,” Florian mused philosophically. “I often regret I wasn’t brought up to it.”
“What’s his name?” Will asked with languid interest, for he had no great faith in the Seer’s musical ear and critical acumen.
“His name? Heaven knows,” the Seer answered, with a short laugh; “but he calls himself Papadopoli?—?Signor Romeo Papadopoli.”
“There’s a deal in a name, in spite of that vastly overrated man, Shakespeare,” Florian murmured, musingly. “It’s my belief, if the late lamented Lord Beaconsfield had only been christened Benjamin Jacobs, or even Benjamin Israels, he never would have lived to be Prime Minister of England. But as Benjamin Disraeli?—?ah, what poetry, what mystery, what Oriental depth, what Venetian suggestiveness! And Romeo’s good, too; Signor Romeo Papadopoli! Why, ’twas of Romeo himself the Bard first asked, ‘What’s in a name? the rose,’ etc?tera. And in the fulness of time, this singer man crops up with that very name to confute him. ‘Ah, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ Why, because it looks so extremely romantic in a line of the playbill, and helps to attract the British public to your theatre! Papadopoli, indeed! and his real name’s Jenkins. I don’t doubt it’s Jenkins. There’s a Palazzo Papadopoli on the Grand Canal. But this fellow was born, you may take your oath, at Haggerston or Stepney!”
“Well, your own name has floated you in life, at any rate,” Rue put in, a little mischievously.
Florian gazed at her hard?—?and changed the subject abruptly. “And there’s a woman in the troupe who sings well, too, I’m told,” he interposed, with airy grace?—?the airy grace of five feet?—?turning to Joaquin Holmes. “I haven’t heard her myself; I’ve been away from town?—?you know how engaged I am?—?visits, visits in the country?—?Lady Barnes; Lady Ingleborough. But they say she sings well; really, Will, you ought to come with us.”
“Yes; she’s not bad in her way,” the Seer admitted, with a stifled yawn, stroking his long moustache, and assuming the air of a connoisseur in female voices. “She’s got a fine rich organ, a little untrained, perhaps, but not bad for a débutante. A piquante little Italian; Signora Carlotta Casalmonte she calls herself. But Papadopoli’s the man; you should come, Mr Deverill; my friend Mr Florian has secured us a box; I dine at Mrs Palmer’s, and we all go together to the Harmony afterwards.”
“I should like to go,” Will replied with truth; for he hated to leave Rue undefended in that impostor’s clutches; “but, unfortunately, I’ve invited my sister and her husband to dine with me to-night at my rooms in Craven Street.”
“Well, wire to them at once to come on and dine here instead,” Rue suggested, with American expansiveness; “and then we can all go in a party together?—?the more the merrier.”
Will thought not badly of this idea; it was a capital compromise: the more so as he had asked nobody else to meet the Sartorises, and a family tête-à-tête with Maud and A............