The quartet that ended the act went smoothly, and the curtain came down in the erratic and halting manner of amateur theatrical curtains, upon an unqualified success. There were calls and recalls; and when Herr Schmidt was obliged to rise in his seat of authority and make a speech, he took the opportunity to explain that, owing to a slight indisposition, Miss Dameron had not felt equal to singing the part of Gretchen, but had exchanged with Miss Merriam; and he was sure that this had been fortunate, for the audience was made to realize that the cast contained two stars not differing one from another in glory.
The second part was not less successful. Copeland, the lawyer who never practised, but who sometimes sang, shared the laurels as the haughty and outraged father, and the choral pieces went capitally.
There was, however, one slight occurrence that nobody understood—an obscure incident of the performance that mystified the cast and not a few of the audience. It came in the singing of a little song written for the part of Christine, the least pretentious musically of all the lyrics in the opera. It was Zelda’s last solo—a little song of the wanderer, the peasant girl, lost from her mistress, and straying alone in the forest. The words were poor, as the art of words goes, but in singing them Zelda forgot herself,—forgot that in a mood of quixotism she had deliberately chosen second place.
“I call no hearth my own,”
she began. There were three verses; and Herr Schmidt, leading her with the violin, felt that at last he was coming into his own. Leighton, standing among the chorus, knew again the exquisite pain that the girl’s voice wrought in him. He knew by the tensity of the hush that fell upon the audience that the song’s appeal was not to himself alone. The professor beamed with joy as the full, deep notes rose in the hall; and he threw down his violin at the end and joined in the applause. And as the hand-clapping continued after Zelda had turned to take up her dialogue, she came smiling down to the footlights, made a sweeping courtesy, and pointed to her throat as she shook her head at the professor, to explain that there could be no encore.
When Mrs. Carr exchanged congratulations with Professor Schmidt at the end—an end marked by tumultuous applause following the grand finale by the whole company—almost her first words were:
“Was that girl’s throat really sore or not?”
And Herr Schmidt lifted his eyes heavenward and shrugged his shoulders, but refused to commit himself.
Mrs. Forrest and Rodney Merriam were in the audience; Zelda’s father had declined to attend.
“Let us speak to Zee and then escape,” said Merriam to his sister, as the chairs were being pushed back for the dance that was to follow the play. A few older people were there and they formed a little colony by themselves. Zelda came out presently from the dressing-room, with her arms full of flowers that had been passed across the footlights, and she bore Olive Merriam with her.