Thus together, hand in hand, they were looking up at the stage when the girl struck the final chord, and rising, turned once more towards the front to make her bow in acknowledgment of the applause. The excitement, the effort, had brought a shell-like color into her subtly modeled cheeks. Once more she looked out into the audience impersonally and then, as she turned to go, unconsciously drawn by the intense gaze of the couple in the second row, her dark eyes dropped to them for an instant's glance of friendly recognition. Madame Garnier felt her son draw a sudden, gasping breath through half-open lips and tighten his hold on her hand.
During the rest of the program her thoughts and plans rose in a busy circling swarm. After all, there were advantages. It might be much worse! Impressionable, sensitive, inexperienced as Jean-Pierre was, it might very well have been some mature married woman in search of a new sensation who had thus caught his first young passion. Or even not his passion at all. Even if he himself had felt nothing, any woman could have victimized him by working on that foolish sensibility of his. If she could make him think—and his mother always had a scared sense of how easy that would be—that she was in love with him, he would never know how to retreat, as more brutal men knew so well how to do. She had always been afraid of some such entanglement as that, in which Jean-Pierre's weakness (in her heart she called it plainly that, and not chivalry or sensibility) would make him a helpless victim of a woman either an old fool herself or a calculating sensualist. Heavens! How many dangers there were in the world for one's son! And sons could not be guarded like daughters, by keeping them under your thumb. There were also, for such a romantic, unworldly boy as Jean-Pierre, all the variations on the Camille theme. How easily some shrewd woman of the demi-monde could have pulled the wool over his eyes! Madame Garnier had no doubts that Jean-Pierre knew such women. Her son was a man like all other men, for all his poetic, high-strung ideas, and had certainly had his part of an ordinary man's life, especially those last two years away from home, irresponsible and alone. Oh, yes, the more she thought shudderingly of the dangers he had escaped, the more harmless appeared this fancy for a school girl. And if his fancy was to light on a young girl, in some ways it was more convenient to have her a foreigner with no family, so to speak, rather than a girl of Bayonne society, whose family would expect to have much to say about all the arrangements of Jean-Pierre's life. Heavens! suppose it had been Elise Fortier—think of Jean-Pierre saddled with Madame Fortier as a mother-in-law! Not that that worthless idle American mother-in-law was much better; except that those people must go back to America some time! Everybody did go back to his native country ultimately. And too, she was a weak, foolish thing who would never have the force to make trouble. Look at the way she let herself be run by her servants. Also, until now, she had paid precious little attention to her daughter; there was no reason to think she would develop any more interest in her later on. And the child herself seemed malleable material. There was no doubt she would be a pretty woman, and marrying very young, she would certainly assimilate the standards of the Garnier family.
When the concert was over, she said to Jean-Pierre, "If you like, we will wait till the girls come out, and walk home with Danielle and her classmates." As she spoke she nodded to old Jeanne Amigorena, the cook in the American family, who stood there, also waiting, her young mistress' cloak and hat on her arm. It occurred to her that one of the first things to do would be to eliminate that servant. She probably knew altogether too much about Marise's family. It would not be prudent to have her around a young ménage; and anyhow, old servants were an intolerable nuisance with their airs of belonging to the family.
Behind the scenes where the girls were waiting for the concert to begin, there had been a deal of giggling and whispering and rustling. Mademoiselle Vivier, chosen to turn the pages for the players because she was so severe it was thought she could keep them in order, was "gend'arming around" as the girls called it, pouncing on one group for laughing too loud, and on another for making too much noise as they executed grotesque caricatures of the way they intended to make their entries on the stage. The moment her back was turned, they whispered and giggled and pranced more wildly than ever, turning deep bows into pirouettes, shaking out their full skirts and whirling about like dervishes. Everybody took care to lose her music and get it all mixed up with everybody's else, just to see Mlle. Vivier go into the air.
"Here's that missing sheet from your Schubert, Marguerite! Oh, no, it's Gabrielle's Chopin!"
"Oh, all the scherzo pages have gone from my Delibes!"
"Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle, I feel so faint, I don't believe I can play."
"Oh, Mademoiselle, I forgot to bring my—oh, yes, here it is, right under Danielle! Get up, Danielle! Get up! Mademoiselle! Danielle Garnier won't get off my music! Oh, Mademoiselle, can't I play my Nocturne instead of the Autumn Leaves! I feel like a nocturne; just ready to go to sleep."
Poor Mademoiselle Vivier, single-handed as she was, grew more and more frantic, rushing about, a dark red flush on her thin face, crying, "Sh, sh!" much more loudly than the girls were whispering, exhorting them angrily to have some manners, not to behave like so many barbarians, and to realize the seriousness of the occasion, the Gambert music prize at stake!