But to Rose, whose ears were not filled with her own music, the silence which followed it came with a shock of terrible revulsion. She waited a moment in keen suspense, but no one spoke, no one moved; the wave of silence that followed the wave of sound engulfed her hopes, she remembered that first disappointment. Bitter dismay swept over her, she turned away to hide her emotion, but the maestro crossed the stage at that instant and held out his hand; he could not praise her but there was actually a tear in his eye.
Rose looked up, and reading his face burst into tears of joy, her hopes suddenly fulfilled.
Then the party of judges broke out with a round of applause and one little Frenchman, with a polished pink bald head and mustaches, shouted: “Brava!”
In the end they crowded around her and overwhelmed her with compliments; they were eager to invite her to a supper and drink her health in champagne, but the staid Virginia cousin, in the old-fashioned black bonnet and the old black alpaca gown, which outraged Paris without hiding the good heart beneath it, frowned on this hilarity; her deep-seated suspicion of the Parisian in general had not been dissipated by this burst of applause. She insisted that Rose, who was trembling with excitement and the strain of the long hours of training, should go straight back to their little apartment to rest. A decision too full of wisdom for even Rose, eager though she was for the sweet meed of praise, to resist it.
They drove back in a fiacre, a wild extravagance which they ventured in view of the great success and the immediate prospects of a fortune; the cousin felt that they were immediate.
“You all were always talented,” she said to Rose, as they drove down the rue de Rivoli; “your mother could do anything; we always said so. Cousin Sally Carter, too, is going to be an artist, and no one ever made preserves like Cousin Anna’s! I reckon it’s in the family, Rose.”
“Oh, Cousin Emily!” Rose sighed, and hid her face on the alpaca shoulder, “oh, if I can only, only sing so well that there shall be no more terrible trouble for father!”
“Now, don’t you worry about the judge, child,” Cousin Emily replied soothingly; “it will all come out right and, anyway, the best families haven’t money now-a-days!” she added with ineffable disdain, “it’s very vulgar.”
“I think I’d risk having it, though!” Rose said, with a sigh.
She was really in a dream. The softness of spring was in the atmosphere as they drove through the gay streets, and all the trees in the garden of the Tuileries were delicately fringed with green; the voices of children, the sounds of laughter, now and then a snatch of song, reminded them that it was a holiday. Rose thought of home; the Persian lilac must be budding, the tulip trees, of course, were in flower; a pang of homesickness seized her, a longing to see the old house again—ah, there was the sorrow of it, could they keep the old house much longer? With these thoughts came others, deeply perturbed, which she tried to thrust away. She knew of Margaret’s sudden death, but she had heard but little of it, of Fox nothing. Her father’s letters excluded the whole matter; Mrs. Allestree’s were chary in mention of it, and from Robert there was no word on the subject. Gerty English, strangely enough, had not written since Margaret’s death, and Rose could only piece together the dim outlines of a tragedy which touched her to the soul. There had been moments when she had been bitter against poor Margaret, had held her responsible, now she thought of her with pity.