"'Don Juan' did not succeed at the first representation," remarked some one behind Lensky. He turned around and looked at the man with a comical, threatening gesture; then he said, with the expression of a man with a bad toothache, who yet bursts out with a witticism: "Who laughs last, laughs best!"
Natalie still stood, helpless and desperate, in the middle of the narrow stairs. Her splendid fur cloak had half slipped down from her shoulders; her simple, distinguished toilet stood out in strange relief from the glaring, tumbled, inharmonious, motley evening adornments of the singers.
"You will take cold, wrap yourself up better," said Lensky, while he came up to her and drew the fur up around her neck.
"Will you take me with you to your supper? I would come with the greatest pleasure; je serai gentille avec tout le monde!" she whispered, softly and supplicatingly to him.
"What an idea!" said he, repellently. "No, to-night I sup as a bachelor. You bar the passage. Drive home quite calmly. Adieu!"
He pushed her into the carriage, and went. She put her head out of the window of the coupé to look after him. She saw how he got into a fiacre with the singer; one of the men crawled in after him; then she heard some one laughing, harshly, gipsy-like, was that he? Then came a great rattling of windows, and creaking and rolling of wheels. Her way and his parted. Hurrying by a row of ghostly gas-lights, which all seemed red to her, she rolled away in a great, cold, black darkness. And ten minutes later, weary and miserable, she crept up the steps of her residence. She knew that something terrible had happened, something that not only embittered her present, but would darken the future, that for her much more had gone wrong than the result of an opera.
* * * * * *
"Who knows, perhaps the thing will pull through; even the best operas have sometimes not immediately found approval with the public," said Lensky, with the awkward, forced smile that had not left his lips since the morning after his fiasco. The challenging, gipsy humor with which, in the beginning, he had sought to bluster over his disappointment, had not lasted long. Quiet, weary, and depressed, he dragged himself around as if after a severe illness. Natalie did what she could to be agreeable to him; her heart bled with pity, but she did not venture to approach him.
He avoided her, and if she spoke to him his answers sounded forced or vexed.
To-day, for the first time since the fatal evening, he turned to her with a remark in reference to his work. It was the third day after the first production of the opera, and at breakfast. Natalie had just read to him many criticisms from the newspapers which had arrived. In many, Lensky's magnificent musical gifts were praised.