In the wings he met the curate, who tried to comfort him. "Don't you mind. It wasn't so bad!" he said genially, clapping George on the back. "That silly girl laughing in the front row put you out."
"Not at all, not at all," declared George. "It was that beastly egg. Besides," he added, "everybody ought to have laughed. I wanted them to laugh. It was intended to be a funny number."
"Oh, was it?" said the curate, somewhat sourly. "You should have announced that on the program. Nobody would have thought it to look at you."
But the next number was already beginning. Mrs. Mellon was on the platform clasping a fan in her gloved hands. The gloves were tight and white and short, and so were her sleeves, and between the two a portion of red and powerful elbow was disclosed. The rose was in her hair, the sash round her waist, her eyes flashed with impassioned Spanish vivacity. At the piano the timid, short-sighted Mr. Mellon took his seat, after a good deal of adjustment of the creaky piano-stool.
No sooner had he nervously started the first notes of the introductory bars than Mrs. Mellon's loud contralto burst from her, and with hand on hip, she informed the audience in French that love was a rebellious bird.
Mr. Mellon, who still had three bars of introduction to play, floundered on awhile, then turned a bewildered face to his wife and stopped playing. There followed a brief low-voiced discussion as to who was wrong—she asking him angrily why he did not go on, and he murmuring that she ought to have waited four bars. Then they began again; and once more Mrs. Mellon told every one that love was a rebellious bird. With Latin fervour, with much heaving of breast and flashing of eye, she declared, "Si tew ne m'aim-ah pas—je t'aim-ah," and the warning, "Si je t'aim-ah prends garde a toe-ah" seemed to acquire a real and very terrifying significance.
Again Chérie, who had listened with becoming seriousness to the opening bars, was seized with a fit of spasmodic laughter. The agitated Mrs. Mellon telling every one to beware of her love seemed to her to be the most ludicrous thing she had ever heard; and she bowed her face in her hands and rocked to and fro with little gasps of hysterical laughter.
Louise glanced at her and then at Mrs. Mellon; and then she, too, was caught by the horrible infection. Biting her lips and with quivering nostrils, she sat rigid and upright, staring at the platform, but her shoulders shook and the tears rolled down her face, which was crimson with silent laughter.
Mrs. Mellon must have seen it—were the culprits not in the first row?—and she looked disdainfully away from them; but her song grew fiercer and fiercer, her notes grew louder and higher as she soared away from the pitch and left poor Mr. Mellon tinkling away in the original key, about three semitones below.
The other refugees, sitting on either side of Chérie and Louise, turned and looked at them; the Pitou children began to giggle but were quickly pinched back into seriousness by their mother.