Part 24 (2/2)

Paula's ”Nedda” was a sulky slattern, indifferent, lazy, smoldering with pa.s.sion,--dangerous. The sensuous quality of her beauty had never been more apparent than it was in the soiled cheap mountebank fineries which she had worn for so many performances of the part in Europe. And this beauty, of course, did a lot of the work for her. Explained the tragedy all by itself. And, indeed, tragedy hung visibly over her from the moment of her first entrance upon the stage in the donkey cart. She was the sort of woman men kill and are killed for.

She played the part with an extreme economy of movement, with a kind of feline stillness which made her occasional explosions into action, as when she attacked Tonio with the whip, literally terrifying. She sang it carelessly and therefore in a manner absolutely gorgeous. She swept them all, critics as well as the immense audience, clean off their feet.

Also, by way of a foot-note, the managerial announcement that Madame Carresford had volunteered for the part at six o'clock, to rescue them from the necessity of closing the park and was to sing it absolutely without rehearsal, exploded for all time the notion that there was anything of the amateur about her.

”You can do anything,” LaChaise told her as she came out into the wings.

And he kissed her on both cheeks rather solemnly, in the manner of one conferring a decoration. In full measure pressed down and running over, that was how Paula's success came to her.

CHAPTER XVII

THE WAYFARER

By the time Paula had got back to her dressing-room after the long series of tumultuous curtain calls was over, the rush of her friends to express their congratulations in person had begun. After the _Tosca_, performance she had been adamant about seeing anybody but to-night with a laugh she said, ”I don't care. For a few minutes. If they're people I really know.”

So Mary took her station beside the Rhadamanthus at the stockade gate--in a proper opera-house, he would have been the stage door-keeper--to pick out the sheep from the goat-like herd of the merely curious who, but for firm measures, would have stormed the place. Those who came down again, pushed out by the weight of new arrivals, lingered about the gate talking things over with Mary. It amused her to see how radically their att.i.tude had changed. Such people as the Averys, the Cravens and the Byrnes, who in a social way had known Paula well, seemed to regard her now as a personage utterly remote, translated into another world altogether. And when they asked about John Wollaston, as most of them did, there was an undertone almost of commiseration about their inquiries, though on the surface this didn't go beyond an expressed regret that he hadn't been here to witness the triumph.

Mary drove them all away at last, even the lingerers in Paula's dressing-room, left her safely in the hands of her dresser and went out into the automobile park to get her car. Coming up softly across the gra.s.s and reaching in to turn on the lights, she was startled to discover that there was a man in it. But before she had time more than to gasp, she recognized him as her father.

”I didn't want to push my way in with the mob,” he explained, after apologizing for having frightened her. ”The car, when I spotted it, seemed a safe place to wait. And the privacy of it,” he added, ”will be grateful, too, since I'm not perfectly sure that Paula won't refuse outright to see me.”

Mary smiled at this and said she hoped he hadn't missed the performance.

”No,” he told her somberly, ”I didn't miss--any of it.” Then on a different note, ”Now we'll see whether those dogs of critics won't change their tune.”

”Paula herself changed the tune,” Mary observed. Then, ”She's longing to see you, of course. And there's no reason why you should wait. No one's with her now except her dresser.”

She led the way, without giving him a chance to demur, to the gate to the stockade and turned him over to the gatekeeper.

”Please take Doctor Wollaston up to his wife's dressing-room,” she said.

And with a momentary pleasure in having evaded introducing him as Madame Carresford's husband, she turned away and went back to the car.

For the moment the spectacle of her father in the role of a young lover touched her no more acutely than with a mild half-humorous melancholy.

She even paid the tribute of a pa.s.sing smile to the queer reversal of their roles, her own and his. She was more like a mother brooding over the first love-affair of an adolescent son. It was so young of him, younger, she believed, than any act she herself could be capable of, to have come to Paula's performance without letting her know and waited shyly alone in the dark while the herd of her acquaintances crowded in and monopolized her. Pathetically young, almost intolerably pathetic in a man in his middle fifties. She wondered if he had come up for _Tosca_ the night before and gone away without a word.

She had spoken quite without authority in a.s.suring him of Paula's welcome. Paula had not, she thought, spoken of him once either in connection with her disappointment the night before or with her triumph to-night. Yet that he would get a lover's welcome she had very little doubt. It was his moment certainly. Paula left alone up there at last, sated with an overwhelming success, tired, relaxed...

With an effort of will Mary settled herself a little more deeply in the seat behind the wheel and lighted a cigarette. She hated having to wait, having to be found waiting when they came down together. She wished she could just--disappear. It wasn't possible, of course.

It was not very long before they came down. ”She says I may stay two days,” John told Mary as they squeezed into their seats in the little roadster. ”Then, relentlessly, she's going to turn me out.” But his voice was beyond disguise that of a lover who has prospered.

Mary drove them in almost unbroken silence all the way, down the ravine road and up through the woods to the house in the village. Then she went on with the car to their garage which stood in a yard of a neighbor, two or three doors away. She rejected with curt good-humor her father's offer to help her with this job. It was what she always did by herself, she said, and took a momentary perverse pleasure, which she despised herself for, in the obvious fact that this troubled him.

Back in the cottage living-room, ten minutes later perhaps, she found him alone and heard then, the explanation of his having come. They had got the Sunday papers out at Hickory Hill as usual in the middle of the morning but had found no reference to the performance of _Tosca_ the night before. John had spent a good part of the day fretting over the absence of any news as to how Paula's venture had succeeded and puzzling over the lack of it in the papers. Then the obvious explanation had struck one of the boys, that the papers that came out to Hickory Hill on Sunday were an early edition.

He had had old Pete drive him straight into town, at that, and there he had found the news-stand edition containing the criticisms. The unfairness of them had disturbed him greatly. Orders or no orders, he hadn't been able to endure the thought of leaving Paula to suffer under the sting of a sneer like that without making at least an effort to comfort her. He had driven out to Ravinia without any idea that she was to sing again that night; had been told of it at the park where he had stopped for the purpose of picking up some one who could conduct him to her house. Learning that she was about to sing again, he had exerted all his will power and waited until this second ordeal should be over.

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