Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 52.djvu/15

Count, though I am only plain Professore, now—"he has a voice like a trumpet, and the patience of all the angels. He will be a great singer."

"Well, it is not my fault," I used to answer; for what could I do?

When you see Nino now, you cannot imagine that he was ever a dirty little boy from the mountains, with one shoe, and that infamous little hat. I think he is ugly still, though you do not think so when he is singing, and he has good strong limbs and broad shoulders, and carries himself like a soldier. Besides, he is always very well dressed, though he has no affectations. He does not wear his hair plastered into a love lock on his forehead, like some of our dandies, nor is he eternally pulling a pair of monstrous white cuffs over his hands. Everything is very neat about him and very quiet, so that you would hardly think he was an artist after all; and he talks but little, though he can talk very well when he likes, for he has not forgotten his Dante nor his Leopardi. De Pretis says the reason he sings so well is because he has a mouth like the slit in an organ pipe, as wide as a letter-box at the post-office. But I think he has succeeded because he has great square jaws like Napoleon. People like that always succeed. My jaw is small, and my chin is pointed under my beard—but then, with the beard no one can see it. But Mariuccia knows.

Nino is a thoroughly good boy, and until a year ago he never cared for anything but his art; and now he cares for something, I think, a great deal better than art, even than art like his. But he is a singer still, and always will be, for he has an iron throat, and never was hoarse in his life. All those years when he was growing up, he never had a love-scrape, or owed money, or wasted his time in the caffè.

"Take care," Mariuccia used to say to me, "if he ever takes a fancy to some girl with blue eyes and fair hair, he will be perfectly crazy. Ah, Sor Conte, she had blue eyes, and her hair was like the corn-silk. How many years is that, Sor Conte mio?" Mariuccia is an old witch.

I am writing this story to tell you why Mariuccia is a witch, and why my Nino, who never so much as looked at the beauties of the generone, as they came with their fathers and brothers and mothers to eat ice-cream in the Piazza Colonna, and listen to the music of a summer's evening,—Nino, who stared absently at the great ladies as they rolled over the Pincio in their carriages, and was whistling airs to himself for practice when he strolled along the Corso, instead of looking out for pretty faces,—Nino, the cold in all things save in music, why he fulfilled Mariuccia's prophecy, little by little, and became perfectly crazy about blue eyes and fair hair. That is what I am going to tell you, if you have the leisure to listen. And you ought to know it, because evil tongues are more plentiful than good voices in Rome, as elsewhere, and people are saying many spiteful things about him,—though they clap loudly enough at the theatre when he sings.

He is like a son to me, and perhaps I am reconciled, after all, to his not having become a philosopher. He would never have been so famous as he is now, and he really knows so much more than Maestro De Pretis—in other ways than music—that he is very presentable indeed. What is blood, nowadays? What difference does it make to society whether Nino Cardegna, the tenor, was the son of a vine-dresser? Or what does the University care for the fact that I, Cornelio Grandi, am the last of a race as old as the Colonnas, and quite as honorable? What does Mariuccia care? What does anybody care? Corpo di Bacco! if we begin talking of race we shall waste as much time as would make us all great celebrities! I am not