He resumed his cautious watch on her and saw her enter the stage door of the Municipal Theater, doubtless to take part in a rehearsal of the company.
For the rest of the day he watched the exits from the theater. But she did not stir out of it. As for her confederate William, he remained invisible.
In the evening Ralph slipped into the back of a box at the theater: and the moment the girl with the green eyes appeared on the stage he could hardly repress a cry of surprise: she was taking the part of Veronique.
“Leonide Balli. So that’s her name?” he said to himself. “She sings in light opera in the provinces?”
He could not get over it. The fact was so different from everything he had imagined about the girl with the green eyes.
Provincial or Parisienne, she showed herself an uncommonly clever comedienne and a most adorable singer, simple, with no straining for effect, moving, full of tenderness and gayety, of modesty and charm. She had all the gifts and all the graces, plenty of cleverness; and a lack of experience of the stage which was a further charm. He recalled his first impression on the Boulevard Haussmann and his fancy that the young girl, whose mask was at the same time so tragic and so childlike, had a double destiny. [[112]]
Ralph passed three delightful hours. He could not tire of admiring the strange creature whom he had only seen, since the charming initial vision, by flashes, in crises of fear and horror. This was another woman in whom everything seemed lightness and harmony. Yet it was indeed she who had murdered and played a part in infamies and crimes. It was indeed the confederate of William!
Of these two so different images which was he to consider the true one? He watched her in the hope to learn, and watched in vain, for a third woman overlay the other two and united them in an intense and moving life, the life of Veronique. Only a few gestures a little too nervous, a few phrases badly delivered, displayed to the eyes of the man who knew the truth, the woman under the heroine, and revealed a state of mind which insensibly weakened her rendering of the part.
“Something fresh must have happened,” Ralph thought. “Sometime between noon and three o’clock there has been some serious incident, which drove her suddenly to the post office, the consequences of which sometimes spoil her artistic efforts. She is thinking about it; it makes her anxious. And if I were to make a guess, I should say that this incident is connected with William, with William who has suddenly disappeared.”
When the girl appeared at the fall of the curtain [[113]]she received an ovation; and a curious crowd thronged the approach to the stage door. Before the door itself was standing a closed landau, drawn by a pair of horses. Since the only train by which it was possible to arrive at Pierrefitte-Nestales, the station nearest to Luz, in the morning, left Toulouse at 12:50, there was no doubt that the girl was going straight to the station, having already sent her luggage there. Ralph had already left his suit case in the cloak-room.