“Yes, it must be a hard life,” assented Vansittart; “all the trouble of the show, and none of the glory.”
And then he took a sweeping survey of the gay crowd, peasants, soldiers, citizens, feasting and rejoicing in friendly German fashion under the open sky. Yes, Mrs. Pembroke was right; most of the chorus were middle-aged, some were elderly—withered old faces, dark skins which even bismuth could not transform to fairness. Italian eyes, dark and glowing, shone out of worn faces where all other beauty was lacking.
Suddenly among all those homely countenances he saw a young face, young and beautiful, a face that flashed upon him first with a rapid thrill of recognition, and then with an aspect that struck into his heart like a dagger, and when that sharp pang was over left a heaviness as of lead.
It was Fiordelisa’s face. He could not be mistaken. Nay, the fact was made certainty as he looked, for he saw that the girl recognized him. She was gazing upward to the spot where he sat; she was talking about him to the woman who stood next her, indicating him with too expressive gesticulation.
Was she telling that stolid listener that the man yonder had slain his fellow-creature in a tavern row; that he was a murderer? She would put it so, no doubt—she whose lover he had killed.
If she were saying this the stolid woman received the statement very placidly. She only nodded, and shrugged her shoulders, and then nodded again, while Fiordelisa talked to her more and more excitedly, with dramatic emphasis. Surely no woman would stand and shrug and nod as this woman shrugged and nodded, at a tale of murder.
Then Lisa looked up again at him, beaming with smiles, her dark eyes sparkling in the gaslight; and then her turn came to swell the chorus; and then the curtain fell, and he saw her no more.
It was as much as he could do to get through the interval before that curtain rose again. Tom Pembroke wanted him to go out for a stroll in the foyer, for a drink of some kind. “I would rather stay with Mrs. Pembroke,” he said, full of wild surmises, prepared for a mysterious knock at the box door, and the appearance of a policeman from over the way to take him in custody at Lisa’s instigation; prepared for anything tragic that might happen to him. What might not happen when the hot-blooded Southern nature was in question? What bounds would there be for the revengeful passion of such a girl as Fiordelisa, who had been robbed by his act of her lover and protector, her possible husband? She had talked of her Englishman’s promise of marriage with an air of innocent security, the remembrance of which smote him sharply, recalling her light-hearted gaiety at the restaurant and at the opera, her grief as she flung herself upon her lover’s corpse. And he, who had thought never to see her again, never even to know her fate, found himself face to face with her, recognized by her, having to answer to her and to society for the deed which he had done.
With these thoughts in his mind, with his ear strained for the knocking at the door, he had to talk small talk to Mrs. Pembroke, to counterfeit amusement at her criticism of the people in the stalls—the man with two strips of hair combed in streaks over a bald head, the woman with corpulent arms bared to the shoulder, the country cousins. He had to laugh at her little jokes, and even to attempt one or two smart sayings on his own account.
The knocking came, and he almost started out of his seat.