'With your voice and talent, I don't see why you needed any protection,
as you call it.' Madame Bonanni laughed again.
'No? You don't see? All the better, little Miss Donne, all the better
for you that you have never been made to see, and perhaps you never
will now. I hope not. But I tell you that in Paris, or in London, or
Berlin, or Petersburg you may have the voice and talent of Malibran,
Grisi and Patti all in one, but if you are not "protected" you will
never get any further than leading chorus-girl, and perhaps not so
far!' 'No one has protected me,' said Margaret, 'and I've got a good
engagement.' The prima donna stared at her for a moment in surprise, and then went
on making up her face. The girl had talent, genius, perhaps, but she
must be oddly simple if she did not realise that she owed her
engagement altogether to the woman who was talking to her. Was Margaret
going to take that position from the first? Madame Bonanni wondered.
Was she going to deliberately ignore that she had been taken up bodily,
as it were, and carried through the short cut to celebrity? Or was it
just the simple, stupid, innocent vanity that so often goes with great
gifts, making their possessors quite sure that they can never owe the
least part of their success to any help received from any one else?
Whatever it might be, Madame Bonanni was not the woman to remind
Margaret of what had happened. She only smiled a little and put on more
powder.
'I'm not defending my life, my dear,' she said, quietly, after a little
pause. 'Of what use would that be, now that the best part of it is
over--or the worst part? I'm not even asking for your sympathy, am I?'
Her voice was suddenly bitter. 'I only care for one human being in the
world--I think I never cared for any other, since he was born! Does
that make my life worse? It does, doesn't it? In the name of heaven,
child,' she broke out fiercely and angrily, without the least warning,
'was no woman ever flattered into playing at love? Not even by a King?
Am I the only living woman that has been carried off her feet by
royalty? It wasn't only the King, of course--I don't pretend it
was--there were others. But that's what Tom will never forgive me--the
money and the jewels! What could I do? Throw them in his face, scream
outraged virtue and cry that he was offending me, when he had nothing
more to ask, and I was half drunk with pride and vanity and amusement,
because he was really in love? Tell some great lady, your duchess, your
princess, to do that sort of thing--if you think she will! Don't ask it
of a Provence girl who has milked the cows and hoed the vines, and then
suddenly has half Europe at her feet, and a King into the bargain!
There was only one thing in the world that could have saved me then--it
would have been to know that Tom would never forgive me. And he was
only a little boy--how could I guess?' She looked up almost wildly into Margaret's eyes, and then bent down,
resting her forehead upon her hands, on the edge of the table.