Down among the dim rows spread out below them sat Hattie Tolliver, in a new gown chosen by Ellen. Large and vigorous she sat, looking a little like a powerful and eccentric duchess, by the side of Miss Ogilvie in her mauve taffeta with the corals and cameos, her thin hair done elaborately in a fashion she had not worn since she was a girl. They sat there, the eagle and the linnet, trembling with excitement, the tears very close to the surface of the emotional Hattie.
Presently, as Ellen took her place at the piano and struck a few crashing chords, Hattie could bear it no longer. She leaned toward the stranger at her side, a woman with short hair and an umbrella, and said in triumph, “That’s my daughter who’s playing.”
The stranger stared at her for an instant and murmured, “Is it indeed?” And the music began.
Hattie really wanted to tell them all—the row upon row of strangers, obscured now by the darkness.
Charles Tolliver at his end of the row closed his eyes and slipped presently into the borderland between sleep and consciousness, a country where there is no reality and all is covered by a rosy mist. Through this the music came to him distantly. He fancied he was back once more in the shabby living room with Ellen playing sullenly at the upright piano. And for a little time he was happy.
Robert, who had no ear for music, felt uncomfortable and disapproved of his sister’s low-cut gown. Robert was a prig; he took after his grandfather Barr, “the citizen.”
The Everlasting was not to be seen. He had been left at home, because it was impossible to say how he would behave on such an occasion. One dared not take the risk.
In the mind of Hattie, sitting there in the shadows of the great hall, there could be no question of failure. Was it not her Ellen, her little girl whom she had once held upon her knee, who now sat, as it were, upon a throne before a world which listened breathlessly? All those people who filled the seats about her and above her might have risen and left, but to Hattie the evening would have been a great success, a triumph in which the judgment of the world had been wrong. They did not leave; instead they sat, leaning forward a bit or slipped down in their seats with closed eyes, bedazzled as much by the perfection and grace of this new musician as by the music itself.
Rebecca, standing in the darkness at the back of the great hall, understood all that. She knew that in part the triumph was her own, for had she not tricked them, hypnotized them? They would not be able to forget. She, like Hattie, felt with every fiber of her body, the very sensations of all those people who listened—people from great houses of the rich who had heard of Lilli Barr from friends in Europe, people from the suburbs who would rush away in frantic haste for the last train home, people—young people—like the one who sat next to Hattie, in shabby clothes and worn shoes, who were fighting now desperately, as Ellen had once fought, to reach that same platform, that same brilliant shower of light. They listened, enchanted by the sound, caught by the spell of one woman’s genius and another’s brilliant trickery. Possessed they were, for the moment.
And presently the tears began to stream down Hattie’s face. They dropped to the hands worn and red, concealed now by the expensive gloves which cramped her uncomfortably.