“Oh, how grand to sing like that!” cried Eline in ecstasy, and she rushed to Madame van Raat, and embraced her with sudden impetuosity. “Doesn’t Paul sing nicely, eh? Isn’t it a shame that he will take no lessons? You ought to make him.”
But Paul declared that Eline gave him lessons enough, and that she would be the death of him with her difficult duos; but Eline again assured him that he had acquitted himself splendidly.
Betsy gave a sigh of relief after the stormy parting of the Veronese lovers, which under the low ceiling and plush draperies of her drawing-room had sounded much too heavy and loud in her ears. To her thinking it was a terrible hullabaloo! Why didn’t Eline rather sing something light and jolly from one or another opéra bouffe?
Eline and Paul having sat down, the conversation grew more general about the on dits of the day, the busy stir in the streets before St. Nicholas’, until it struck half-past nine, when Mina came to say that the carriage was there.
“’Tis time for me,” said Madame van Raat, slowly rising from her seat; and Eline ran away, humming as she went, to fetch her things from the boudoir, a fur circular, a woollen shawl, a cape. She let herself be snugly muffled up by her young favourite, and carefully placed her glasses and the crochet-work in her reticule. Then she kissed them all, bending over them with the slow movements of tired old age, and Henk and Paul assisted her into the soft satin cushions of the brougham.
The carriage rolled away; and in Madame van Raat’s ears there still resounded the echo of singing voices; she smiled sadly as she wiped the vapour from the window to look outside where the snow was lying, dirty and bespattered in the light of the street lanterns, and thought of the time when she used to go to the opera with her husband. [[69]]
Paul stayed a little longer; and then, after a good glass of wine after his duos, he hurried off. When he had gone Eline went up-stairs to put the room in order a little, as she told Betsy. It was chilly in Eline’s sitting-room, but the cool air was refreshing to her cheeks and hands, heated by the faint atmosphere of the drawing-room. She threw herself on the Persian cushions, raised her hand, and stroked the leaves of the azalea. And she smiled, whilst her eyes grew large in a dreamy stare as her thoughts flew back once more to Fabrice with his beard and his splendid voice. What a pity that Betsy did not care more for the opera! They went but very rarely, and yet she was so passionately fond of it. Yes; she would give Madame Verstraeten to understand, in a genteel way of course, that she would not mind being invited now and then to accompany her; Mr. Verstraeten never went himself, and Madame generally invited some one or another to a place in her box, sometimes Freddie, sometimes Paul—why not her?
All at once she jumped up as a thought suddenly struck her; last night Fabrice had appeared in William Tell. She ran out of her room and leant over the banisters of the stairs.
“Mina, Mina!” she cried.
“Yes, miss,” answered Mina, who was just passing along the hall with a tray full of wine-glasses.