The scene was laid in a dim, Moorish garden in the shadow of a ruined temple, bathed in the mystic beams of moonlight. Before the broken archway a tall, dark, haughty man stood with folded arms looking down at the suppliant kneeling on the ground, her loose, white robe dishevelled, her dark hair broken from its fillets of gold, and flowing in careless tresses around her, half hiding her slender form in its luxuriant veil. At a little distance stood a lovely little siren who had lured the fickle man from his rightful love and duty. His eyes were fixed on her, not on his sorrowful, pleading wife.
At that moment, when the attention of the whole vast throng was concentrated in intense silence upon the scene, there suddenly broke through the back of the stage a vast and terrible sheet of flame that lighted the whole scene with a crimson, deadly glare. A tumultuous shriek of horror and despair rose from the throng, and the actors rushed wildly forward toward the footlights in a frenzied effort at escape. The prima donna's foot became entangled in her flowing robe, she swayed and fell forward across the footlights that instantly licked the soft folds of her dress into a winding sheet of flame.
[CHAPTER XXXVII.]
There ensued a panic that baffled description. One impulse moved the whole excited, shrieking throng—they surged forward madly toward the doors and windows, bent on escape.
They were like maniacs for the time. The weak fell down beneath the feet of the strong, and were heedlessly trampled, while groans and cries, sometimes mixed with curses, divided the shuddering air.
Violet Earle had shrieked and fainted in the arms of her half-maddened brother. There was not one to avert the awful fate of her who a single moment before had held every heart enchained by the power of her beauty and genius.
Yes, there was one—one only, it seemed. In an instant after the terrible flames had wrapped their fiery tongues around the slender form of the prima donna a man sprang over the footlights upon the stage at one rapid bound from the parquette floor.
He had caught up a heavy camel's-hair shawl, dropped by a lady in her hurried flight. Rushing forward, utterly heedless of the advancing flames that scorched his face and his hair, he threw the heavy shawl over the blazing form and smothered out the fire. Then, lifting the senseless girl in his arms, he made his way with the greatest difficulty to a door and forced his way through the striving mass of human beings out upon the thronged pavement.
The prima donna's carriage was waiting on the pavement, and Professor Larue, who had come with it a minute before, was darting frantically up and down ceaselessly around the doors of the doomed building.