“No, I want you here.” She pointed to the foot of the bed. “Where I won’t miss a word or an expression. Now tell me—about everything.”
In a low voice, without stress or excitement, he related the incidents that always occur at a dress rehearsal. Props that had to be replaced at the last minute. The leading woman’s gowns gone wrong. The house cat sauntering across the stage during the big scene and its portent, good luck! Kane’s decision to light him with white instead of amber in the final act. All the little shadings, the quaint superstitions, the unimportant incidents that make the stage the fascinating realm it is, even to the initiated.
She listened with lips parted and an occasional faint nod of the head. It was her world, too, though the world in which she had failed.
Her smile said she knew he couldn’t be that, but the lips told him:—
“That’s good. A bad dress rehearsal is sure to mean a great opening.” A sudden longing, uncontrolled, held her eyes. “How I’d love to see it!”
He bent down, lifted one of the white hands on the coverlet, pressing it against his lips.
“I don’t know how I can go through without you,” came in spite of him.
“You must, dear! You mustn’t even think of me.”
“It’s too much to ask,” the broken voice plunged on. “To go out and face that crowd with you—here! I can’t do it—I can’t!”
“You must do it, my love.” The spirit so much stronger than the body shone from her eyes. “I’ll be thinking of you and praying for you. I’ll be with you all through the performance. I’ll follow each line—every tiny bit of business. But you must put me out of your mind. Only your part must count—only your success.”
He was silent, pressing the little hand between his warm palms as if to send the vitality from his veins into hers. But the only vitalized part of her was the feverishly bright look of eyes that drew his.
“You know how I always loved the stage—how I always wanted to be a great actress.”
The big burning eyes traveled into the past. Haltingly, with breath uneven and the words only faintly spoken, she drifted on the tide of memory back toward that horizon of hope so many see but never reach.
“Frank—do you remember in the old stock days when we first met—how jealous I was of you?”