“What am I singing?” she asked in astonishment. “Listen to my song:
“‘He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.’”
No one in the theatre could look on with indifference, all were in the grip of a common feeling, all sat as if enchanted, never moving their eyes from the stage.
But more persistently, and more eagerly than anyone else, Kostromsky stood in the wings and watched her every movement. In his soul, his sick and proud soul, which had never known restraint or limit to its own desires and passions, there now blazed a terrible and intolerable hatred. He felt that this poor and modest girl-student had definitely snatched from his hands the evening’s success. His drunkenness had, as it were, quite gone out of his head. He did not yet know how this envious spite which boiled in him could expend itself, but he awaited impatiently the time when Ophelia would come off the stage.
“I hope all will be well. We must be patient; but I cannot choose but weep to think they should lay him in the cold ground,”
he heard Ophelia say, in a voice choked with the madness of grief.
“My brother shall know of it, and so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my coach! Good-night, ladies; good-night, sweet ladies; good-night, good-night.”
Yureva came out in the wings, agitated, breathing deeply, pale even under her make-up. She was followed by deafening cries from the audience. In the doorway she stumbled up against Kostromsky. He purposely made no way for her, but she, even when her shoulder brushed against his, did not notice him, so excited was she by her acting and the rapturous applause of the public.
“Yureva! Yureva! Brav-o-o!”
She went back and bowed.