It was very effective—that silence before the storm. People would lean forward and fairly hold their breath, feeling there was a death struggle coming. And just at that very moment of tensest feeling, as we two
women silently measured each other, a man's voice clearly and exultantly declared:—
"Well, now, we'll get the returns read, I reckon."
In one instant the whole house was in a roar of laughter. Under cover of the noise I said to my companion, who was showing her annoyance, "Keep still! keep still!"
And as we stood there like statues, utterly ignoring the interruption, there was a sudden outbreak of hissing, and the laughter stopped as suddenly as it had burst out, and our scene went on, receiving even more than its usual meed of applause. But when the curtain had fallen, I had my own laugh; for it was funny, very funny.
In Boston there was an interruption of a different nature. It was at a matinee performance. There were tear-wet faces everywhere you looked. The last act was on. I was slipping to my knees in my vain entreaty to be allowed to see my children as their
mother, not merely as their dying governess, when a tall, slim, black-robed woman rose up in the parquet. She flung out her arms in a superb gesture, and in a voice of piercing anguish cried:—
"For God's sake, let her have her children! I've lived through such loss, but she can't; it will kill her!"
Tears sprang to the eyes of every one on the stage, and there was a perceptible halt in the movement of the play. And when, at the death scene, a lady was carried out in a faint, we were none of us surprised to hear it was she who had so far forgotten where she was as to make that passionate plea for a woman whose suffering was probably but a faint reflection of her own.