There were figures, the indistinct forms of men, standing behind the ladies; but these he could not identify.
A great sigh of ecstasy, half anguish, escaped him. He leaned forward, and at that instant the girl raised her face and saw him.
Under the shock of recognition, he was conscious of nothing but that he had bowed across the house—that he had immediately leaned back in his seat, his pulses drumming, his eyes blinded with emotion.
When he dared to look again—the grille was closed.
A swerve of actual vertigo seemed to send him reeling. The next moment, thinking—though, indeed, he had done, had looked, nothing to attract observation—that his condition must be patent to the audience, to the stage, he brought his reason by a huge effort under command.
The grille was shut. The door of heaven had been slammed in his face.
Now, he must fight to ignore the fiends of wicked alarm that swarmed about his brain. He would close all his avenues of intelligence—render himself a thing mute and dumb, his faculties in abeyance, until the moment of resolution should arrive. There might be any explanation, other than one personal to himself, of the shutting of the grating. Should he flog his reason for a wherefore, it would be like brutally coercing an innocent witness. He must not, in the name of sanity, allow his soul to be drawn into profitless speculations. Upon the supreme ecstasy of knowing that here, after all these sick months of waiting, was the period to be put at last to his uncertainty, he must concentrate his thoughts, permitting none to side issues.
He triumphed by sheer force of will—sitting out the end of the little play. But the instant the curtain fell he rose to his feet, swept the frost from his brain, and—without giving himself stay or pause in which to think—left his box and made his way round to the opposite side of the house. His head now seemed full of heat and light; he was not conscious of his lower limbs.
Almost immediately he came upon two men stepping from the rear of a box into the passage. One of these was the Duke of Orleans. The other was a tallish young man, a little older than himself, of a fine intelligent expression. Both gentlemen were dressed to the prevailing taste in clothes that were something an ostentatious advertisement of bourgeoisie. But the extravagance was vindicated in the younger of the two by the mournful spirit of romance that seemed to inhabit behind a pair of very soft grey eyes.
Ned addressed Egalité at once, and in a manner, unwittingly, almost imperious; for in this tender present sensitiveness of his condition he imagined he foreread in that person’s stony regard a repudiation of his acquaintanceship, and he was desperate to preoccupy the situation. He had not, indeed, forgotten the confidential words uttered by the duke at the moment of their first and latest parting; and now his heart went sick in the fear of what might be implied by Egalité’s obvious intention to stultify, by avoidance of him, any significance such confidence might have been held to express.