IX
Of a sudden Miss Daley missed her mentor's voice, his counsel and encouragement, and in the middle of a sob ceased to cry precisely as she might have shut off a tap.
In a moment of uncertainty, still confronting the clicking camera, still bathed in that withering blaze, she cast about blankly for her runagate director. Then discovering that he had, just like a man! deserted her in her time of trouble to follow a band, outraged womanhood asserted itself, in a twinkling she cast her passion like a worn-out garment and became no more the broken plaything of man's fickle fancy but once again the spoiled sweetheart of the screen.
As Lucinda saw it, there was something almost uncanny in the swiftness and the radical thoroughness of that transfiguration, the fiery creature who sprang to her feet with flashing eyes and scornful mouth was hardly to be identified with the wretched little thing whom she had seen, only a few seconds since, grovelling and weeping on the floor.
The cameraman stopped cranking and, resting an elbow on his camera, turned with a satiric grin to observe developments. And following a sharp, brief stir of apprehension in the ranks of the professional element, there fell a dead pause of dismay, a complete suspension of all activities other than those of the musicians and their volunteer leader, and of the calloused carpenters, who, as became good union laborers, continued to go noisily to and fro upon their lawful occasions, scornful of the impending storm.
As one who finds the resources of her mother tongue inadequate, Miss Daley in silence fixed with a portentous stare the back of King Laughlin, who, all ignorant of the doom hovering over his devoted head, kept on swaying airily to and fro, smiling his ecstatic smile and measuring the music with fluent hands.
One of the Daley feet began to tap out the devil's tattoo, she set her arms akimbo, her eyes were quick with baleful lightnings, her pretty lips an ominous line; an ensemble that only too clearly foretold: At any minute, now!
With a smothered grunt Mr. Culp heaved out of his chair and lumbered over to his wife, interposing his not negligible bulk between her and the unconscious object of her indignation—and in the very nick of time, or Lucinda was mistaken.
What he said couldn't be heard at that distance, the sour whining of the violin, the lamentations of the 'cello, and the tinkle-tinkle of the tinny piano conspired to preserve inviolate those communications between man and wife which the law holds to be privileged. But Lucinda noticed a backward jerk of the Culp head toward the group of which she made one, and caught a glance askance of the Daley eyes, oddly intent and cool in contrast with the guise of unbridled fury which her features wore. And whatever it was that Mr. Culp found to say, indisputably it proved effectual; for nothing worse came of Miss Daley's wrath, at least publicly, than a shrewish retort inaudible to bystanders, a toss of her head, and a sudden, stormy flight from the scene.