“Oh, I shall be all right; through all my excitement I feel sure of that! Why, you are more nervous for me than I am for myself! Look here, Harry—I am sure you are not well; the shock you had this morning has been too much for you. Don’t come for me to-night—indeed, there is no need; I will send for a cab and come back as safely as possible.”
Rather to her surprise, he said quickly, as he helped her out of the hansom:
“Yes, yes, that will be the best; I am not very well, I think William shall bring you home.”
He had paid the fare, and they had reached the stage-door together. Two of the actors were outside, and they raised their hats and began speaking to Annie. Without pausing in her talk, she gave her hand lightly to her husband, as he stood there still, anxious to be with her as long as he could. She felt again that his hand was trembling, and she turned to him to say:
“Don’t watch the piece, Harry; it will make me more nervous than ever to know that you are sitting in front, in a fever lest I should make some slip.”
“I’m all right; I must see you through it,” said he, huskily; and he snatched away his hand, and, wishing the others, whom he knew, good-evening and success, went off very quickly, almost, it seemed to Annie, as if he were afraid of breaking down if he stayed. She went into the theater very much affected by this proof of his attachment to her, and, as she took from the box where they had been lying the flowers he had brought from Covent Garden that afternoon for her to wear that night, she raised the heavy white roses and the sweet stephanotis to her lips before she fastened them in the front of the cream-white muslin dress in which she was first to appear.
The audiences at the fashionable comedy theaters are not, as a rule, demonstrative; but, when Annie came off the stage, after her best scene that night, she knew that she had made a “hit.” It was the first distinct, noteworthy success of her career, and her heart beat fast as she thought that now she had her foot firmly upon the ladder, and the future seemed to be clear before her. She did not for a moment think she had got to the top; she knew quite well that struggles and some failures lay still in her path; but that a good beginning toward a prosperous artistic career had been made was a fact which set the blood tingling in her veins and brought the fierce light of hopeful ambition into her dark eyes, when, her share in the work of the evening over, she exchanged the dress she had worn on the stage for the one in which she had come to the theater, and went down from her dressing-room to the green-room to wait for the end of the performance and the final verdict of the first-night audience upon the piece.
It was a favorable one; and Annie found her way to the stage-door, on her way out, with congratulations ringing in her ears and the knowledge that, as certainly as certainty is possible in theatrical matters, the long weeks of anxious and tedious rehearsal were to be rewarded by a calm and prosperous run of the new piece.
At the door she found William dancing about, having been with difficulty restrained by the hall doorkeeper from rushing through the door which led on to the stage. He dragged her arm through his, and in high glee helped her into the hansom, and, as he flung himself in afterward, began at once:
“Oh, Annie, you were splendid, you were immense! I didn’t think you could act like that. It wasn’t like acting at all, I’m sure, the way you take that toffee! Oh, well, it was just like life, just like the way you used to go on with me at the Grange! Poor, old Grange! I wonder if I shall ever see it again?”