Mary Wollaston by Henry Kitchell Webster (best story books to read txt) 📕

The opera had been billed in advance for a repetition on the following Saturday night, the understanding among the powers being that if it failed to get a sufficient measure of favor the bill should be changed. It was touch and go, but the final decision was that it should have another chance.

So LaChaise agreed to March's request, ran over the composer's revised manuscript with a subtle French smile, sent for the timpani player, who was an expert copyist, and put him to work getting the altered parts ready, instanter. March told Mary he was making a few changes and asked her to stay away from rehearsals so that on Saturday night, from out in front, she might get the full effect.

Really, as it turned out, he did not need any individual testimony, for one could have learned the effect of the new ending from half a mile away. When he came back into the wings from his fourth recall he saw her face shining with joy through her tears. But his heart sank when he saw, standing beside her, Paula. He thanked his gods that Mary had a sense of humor.

Paula was smiling in high satisfaction, and she spoke first. "Well, stupid," she demanded, "what have you got to say for yourself, now?"

"Not a word," he answered, smiling too, "except that we have to live to learn."

Then he explained to Mary. "That ending--having the girl come back to life again, to sing some more after she'd been shot--was one of the things Paula was trying to make me do, all the while. And some of the other changes were, too."

"But not that trumpet," said Paula, and he could only blush.

In a moment of dead silence, just before the crash that accompanied the descent of the curtain, he had scored for the C trumpet, muted and pianissimo, a phrase in the rhythm of the first three bars of the _Marsellaise_, but going up on the open tones and sustaining the high G, so that it carried also, a suggestion of _The Star Spangled Banner_. A flagrant trick, but it had served to remind the audience, bruised by the horror of abomination it had just witnessed, of the vengeance which, afar off, was gathering.

"I'd like to know what you'd have said to me," Paula went on, "if I'd asked you to do that!"

Mary laughed, and pushed her lover toward the stage. "Oh, go back," she said. "They want you again, my dear."

They gave _The Outcry_ two more performances during the next week, one of them being the closing performance of the season, and by that time, so far as a single success could be said to establish any one, March was established. He and Mary discussed this rather soberly as they drove home in the small car after the convivial wind-up supper at the Moraine, where this fact had been effusively dwelt upon. Their wedding was now less than a month off.

"I know," she admitted, "it looks as if I were all wrong. To go on being afraid of--harness and millstones and all that. But just the same ... Oh, you can live my sort of life. That's been made plain enough. But I wish I could think of some way of making you sure that I could live yours, as well. Your old one; the _Chemineau_ one. The way it was when you came to Hickory Hill."

A few minutes later she gave a sudden laugh. "Tony," she said, "will you swear you will do something for me--without knowing what it is? Oh, it's nothing very serious. It's about our honeymoon. A girl has a right to decide about that, hasn't she?"

"You've got something up your sleeve, all right," he said dubiously; but she remained severely silent until he gave in and promised.

"Well, then," she said, "this is what our honeymoon is going to be. We'll take one of the farm Fords-Rush can spare one, I'm sure, in October-and we'll get some camping things and start out--oh, along any one of your old routes--without one single cent of money. And we'll tune pianos as we go. We'll live off the country. Really and honestly take to the road. For a month. If we can't find any pianos we'll go hungry--or beg! The one thing we won't do, whatever happens, is to telegraph. After we've done that we'll come back and be--regular people. And I won't mind, then. Because, don't you see, you'll know. And if it's ever necessary to do it again, we'll do it again."

"There's no one in the world," he remarked in a voice that wanted to break, "--no one in the world who'd have thought of that but you. But, my dear, I don't need any reassurance like that."

"Tony, dearest, don't be solemn," she admonished him. "Won't it be _fun_!"

THE END


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Publication Date: 09-08-2009

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