The last sobbing notes of the violin died away. Slowly, reverently, the
girl lowered the bow and lifted her chin; the throat-filling hush
wrought by the conjuring of her music became wild, unrestrained applause
as the spell broke. The beating surges of sound from the gallery, the
balcony, the floor seemed to frighten her a little; the frail body in
its simple white frock shrank before it; but the girlish lips smiled
bravely as she bowed her way to the wings.
Clamorous, insistent, the applause continued. She reappeared; silence
came as she lifted the violin to her chin. The lilting fantasy of a
folk-song rollicked from under the dancing bow. Once more came the
enthusiastic outburst when she finished. She gestured her thanks, smiled
an instant at the upper right-hand box, laughed and kissed her hand to
the lone occupant of lower left and ran from the stage.
“Sheer genius, Sydney!” murmured Thornley Colton, in expression of the
reverence good music always aroused in him; for music, to the blind man,
held all the pleasures that painting, sculpture, and beautiful
architecture hold for those whom God has given sight. Now his whole
face, from the high forehead to the lean, cleft chin, was alight; even
the sightless eyes seemed to shine behind the great blue circles of the
smoked-glass, tortoise-shell-rimmed library spectacles that accentuated
the striking whiteness of his face and hair.
“Wonderful!” breathlessly agreed the red-cheeked, black-haired Sydney
Thames, secretary and constant companion of the blind man.
“It makes my woids muss up when I try to talk,” gulped The Fee,
freckle-faced, red-haired, blue-eyed boy, who had become a member of the
Colton household at the conclusion of a particularly baffling murder
case. Thornley Colton laughed softly and pushed back his chair. Then
real alarm came to the boy’s voice. “Gee, yuh ain’t goin’ now?” he
pleaded. “They’s a coupla comedy acr’bats an’ a wop knife t’rower yet!”
“We’ll wait,” promised Colton, as he made room for a pale-faced young
man who had just risen to hurry past him and out of the box.
The problemist moved his chair farther back, and whispered to Sydney.
“Our friend who just left seems to be troubled with a mighty bad case of
nerves,” he observed. “My cane could feel his chair trembling under him
the whole time the girl was playing. He seemed to jump a foot when she
left the stage that last time, and he’s been muttering under his breath
ever since. What happened?”
“I’d say he was wildly in love with her, and madly jealous of some one
else,” accounted Sydney. “She smiled up at him an instant after that
last encore, but she immediately turned and kissed her hand to the man
in the lower left-hand box. If ever black rage shone in a man’s face it
was on that of our neighbour. He isn’t more than twenty-two or three,
and he doesn’t look as if he had ever learned to curb a nasty temper.”
“He left as if he were going in search of some one’s heart blood,”
smiled the blind man, leaning back in his chair.
One of the comedy acrobats had just succeeded in pushing the other from
a high table, and was joyously dancing on his rubber stomach, to the
great delight of The Fee, and some fourteen or fifteen hundred others.
“You don’t happen to know the occupant of lower left?” asked Colton.
Somehow the thought of sordid jealousy of two men, and a girl whose
witchery could produce such music, seemed to jar.
Sydney gazed covertly down at the occupant of lower left. He was a
big-bodied man, and fat. There were fleshy pouches of good living and
bad drinking under his eyes; but no dissipation could hide the iron
will, the dominant arrogance the heavy chin showed. He sat back in the
deep box, the black of his evening clothes verging into the black of the
heavy velvet hangings that covered the wall behind him. The white
expanse of shirt front contrasted strikingly with the sombre background;
one white fist rested on the back of a gold chair.
“It’s James P. Cartwright, the theatrical manager!” returned Sydney
suddenly. “Her manager!” he supplemented in sudden anger as he compared
the innocent girlishness of the violinist and the coarse grossness of
the recognized man in the box. Sydney Thames deified all women from
afar, for he had forbidden himself the joys of propinquity, because he
could never forget that he had no name but that of the English river on
the banks of which Thornley Colton had found him, a bundle of dirty
baby-clothes, years before.
“Cartwright has an unenviable reputation among his women of the stage,”
muttered Colton. The smile was gone from the thin, expressive lips now.
The rocking notes of the fantastic folk-song still haunted him; the
sobbing cadence of the piece she had played before was in his mind: an
omen of tragedy. A soul that could conjure music like that--and a
Cartwright who, gossip said, demanded his price for others’ success!
The two comedy acrobats had disinterred themselves from an avalanche of
chairs and a table; the first to his feet had been promptly knocked down
by the other, and dragged off the stage by his heels, while The Fee and
a few hundred others shouted and clapped their approval. A card
announced Signor Delvetoi and his marvellous whirling knives.
Sydney, watching the occupant of the lower left, saw him take out a big
watch impatiently, lean ponderously back in a chair, and summon an
usher. The uniformed man came, listened a moment, nodded, and opened the
door at the stage end of the box, to reappear a moment later and whisper
his message, or news. Cartwright nodded, and turned his attention idly
toward the stage, where the signor sent a whirling knife toward the high
boards before which his yellow-haired partner had set a red apple
swinging on a long string. The knife point thudded into the wood; the
cut string parted, and the apple rolled to the stage floor.
“Gee, that’s some stunt!” ecstatically exclaimed The Fee, as he
enthusiastically described the feat of the black-bearded signor to
Colton.
A handful of playing cards flurried before the wooden stop. Three
whirling knives shot across the whole length of the stage; three cards
were pinned fast, and the assistant held them up triumphantly to show
the pierced ace spots.
Cartwright inclined his head in a nod of grudging approval, then turned
quickly as he heard the door that led back to the stage open. Sydney saw
the girl who had played appear in her street clothes, a simple white
shirt waist and dark skirt, her coat thrown over her arm. He gritted his
teeth at the greeting she gave the theatrical manager, and as he saw the
flush of happiness on the winsome face, while the thick lips of the man
grinned as he took her coat. Cartwright jerked his thumb toward the
stage where the dexterous signor had just succeeded in planting five
knives in a black spot not bigger than a half dollar.
He pulled his chair close to that of the girl, and they sat talking; the
girl with many pretty, unconscious gestures, the man listening, with a
jerky nod now and then. They were in the rear of the box, not three feet
from the heavy velvet hangings that covered the wall back of them. They
could not be seen from the body of the theatre, but from the upper box
opposite, where Sydney sat, everything in their box was visible.
Sydney interrupted The Fee’s excited description of the signor’s act
long enough to tell the news to Colton; and he made no excuse for his
spying. The blind man nodded grimly, and continued his patient listening
to The Fee, who was having the time of his young life. The signor, in
his suit of black silk and his black, pointed beard, had performed
miracles with the whirling knives. Now the boy waited breathlessly for
this last feat, because the soft music of the orchestra told him it
would be the best of all. A huge frame was being lowered from the flies.
The blond assistant stepped to the small shelf, thrust her hands through
the leather loops, and stood against the golden back, arms spread wide,
feet apart. The signor brought his table of glittering knives to the
footlights; the frame and the assistant swung aloft. The lights went
out. Darkness for a few brief seconds, then the calcium from the balcony
outlined the suspended woman and the gold background.
“Ah!” The Fee’s gasp swelled a thousand others, as the knife shot into
the calcium beam from the darkness below, whirled with a thousand silver
fires, and buried its point in the wood, blade grazing the cheek of the
woman. A few seconds of breathless suspense, and another followed, to
graze the ear. Even Sydney forgot the man and girl in the box as he
watched the whirling blades. The weirdness of the thing held him
fascinated; the knives, hurled from the hands of the man who was
invisible in the darkness below the single light beam, pinwheeled
through the light to find their place unerringly.
Then something caused Sydney Thames to turn his eyes again to the lower
box. At the instant a flash of lurid light leaped from the darkness,
silhouetting with startling vividness the seated man and girl. The roar
of a pistol came to his ears; and while the light cut the darkness he
saw behind the seated man and girl the face of the youth who had been in
the box with them; the man whose jealousy had been shown so plainly.
Pandemonium followed instantly. A chair crashed over in the darkness
across the theatre; clear above the cries of the panic-stricken men and
women came the scream of a man:
“My God! I didn’t do it! I didn’t! I didn’t!”
The scream stopped. “Lights!” frenziedly called some one from the
darkness.
They came. In the box opposite, Sydney Thames saw Cartwright struggling
with the man whose face he had seen so distinctly in the pistol’s flash.
On the floor of the box, face downward, was the girl of the violin.
Between her shoulders, on the white shirt waist, was a widening splotch
of crimson.