The rival whom, without having seen her, she had dethroned, was obliterated. It was not a transfer of allegiance—it was Semiramis; trampling an overthrown empress among the charred ruins of her palace, acclaimed without one dissentient shout, in her stead, and as the initial of a new line of sovereigns. She enchanted, interested and amused, while Rebecca had awed, ravished and strove apparently in vain to lift to a level where the élite alone soar without dread of a fall.
A witty cardinal has said that if a fly were seen in the drinking-cup by an Italian, a Frenchman and a German, respectively, the first would send it away, the second fish out the insect before he drank, while the German would gulp liquor and fly, without demur.
The good audience of Freyers' Harmonista swallowed the so-called Fraulein von Vieradlers, flies and all! Claudius saw no more clearly than they; not only was the girl an unsurpassable idol, but to its very feet it was pure gold and immaculate ivory. An insane idea seized him not only to win her—a hundred around him shared that desire—but to keep her spotless, as he thought her, whatever the gossips had said. After all, slander had no opening to attack one whose youth was manifest; who owed no complexion to the wax-mask, the bismuth powder, and the carmine; whose hair was real and fine and of a shade which no dye could imitate; and whose movements, though in a society dance far removed from the wild whirl of the monads seen on this same stage, had the freedom of the bacchantes.
After all, the unworthiness of the object no more changes the quality of love than that of the glass alters the banquet of wine.
Oh, to withdraw her from this turbulent career, for which surely she was not inextricably destined, and let her be the bright but flawless ornament of a happy home and a choice circle—if not the lady of fashion, in case the student realized one of his fantastic dreams of aimless ambition. The quiet learner felt an immense flame usurp the place of his blood; he seemed gifted with the powers of the athletic Duke of Munich, Christopher the Leaper, whose statue adorned the proscenium, and like him, clearing the orchestra with a bound of twelve feet, he would have grasped the girl wasting her graces of voice and person on these boors, and carried her off to a more congenial sphere.
Obliged to repeat her song and the dance which filled the gap between two verses, the charmer held the spectators in a spell even more firm than that she had first imposed.
No one was conscious at the first that down the central aisle had come a little party odd enough in its components and awe-inspiring in what might be called its rear-guard to break even enchantment more potent.
An old woman, wearing over sordid garments an old furred Polish pelisse, was the guide—the herald, so to say, to a gentleman in gold spectacles and a black suit and silk hat, an inspector of police, a sergeant of the watch, while behind this formidable official nucleus marched a serried body of civil and of military police. After them all, wringing his fat hands, trotted the proprietor, with a terrified expression too great not to be assumed. Waiters completed the retinue, wearing faces much whiter than the napkins slung on their arms.
As the orchestra faced the audience, they perceived this inroad before the latter and, as by a signal, ceased playing. The startled dancer, for all her aristocratic self-command, stopped immediately for explanation, and, riveting her glances on the female head of the intruders, whom she recognized—that was clear—stood stupor-stricken.
Claudius, following her hint, turned to the center and had no difficulty in recognizing in the woman arrayed in the Polish pelisse, the chief of the beggars, Baboushka. He recalled the remark of the Jew, that she befriended this debutante, and he was averse to believing it. That delicious creature and this hideous one in ties of communion! ridiculous, monstrous!
Spite of his concern for himself, Claudius noticed that twenty or thirty of the spectators, apparently perplexed at the rare conjunction of their leader and the authorities in friendly communication, would not wait for the elucidation but began to make a rush for the outlets.
The voice of the town inspector, rotund and sonorous, froze them with terror, although not personal.
"Gentlemen—(the ladies were apparently here only on sufferance, and the stage-performer was of no consideration in the authorities' eyes)—Gentlemen, a murder has been committed and we seek the culprit here in your midst!"
"Murder!" and the audience rose to their feet like one man.
"Stand up here," said the functionary, pointing to a place on a bench which a timid spectator had vacated, and pushing Baboushka roughly, "and point out the man who has made away with the honorable Major von Sendlingen."
"Major von Sendlingen!" repeated the audience, shocked, as the officer had been seen but the night previously among them in lusty life, and death is a spectre most terrible in a saloon of mirth and carousal.
After that general exclamation, a silence ensued; one that meant acquiescence in the proceedings of the police.
"I must have killed him," thought the student. "This is a black prospect! I had better have quitted the hall and profited by the invitation of refuge which Herr Daniels offered me."
For the moment, he could take no part, though he could not doubt that Baboushka would denounce him—a stranger, and the principal in the duel with canes. His cloak would help toward the identification and unless the hag's crew had abstracted it, it would be forthcoming, he doubted not.
Indeed, elevated on her perch, able to see the faces of all around her, the hag's aged but brilliant eyes rapidly scanned those nearest her in wider and wider circles. All at once they became fixed upon Claudius, and by instinct, the neighbors fell away from him so that he was isolated. She extended her arm with an unnatural vigor, and in a voice also unexpectedly strong with malice, cried:
"That is he! there you have the slayer of poor Major von Sendlingen!"
At that very moment, a shrill, ear-splitting whistle sounded; and the gas-jets all over the hall went out too simultaneously for the act not to be that of a hand at the inlet from the street-main. Claudius heard the soldiers and policemen buffeting the people to scramble over the benches toward him. He had but a single road to a possible escape: by the little door in the wall through which Rebecca Daniels had ushered him into the auditorium. He stooped as he turned, to elude any outstretched hands, drove himself like a wedge through the compacted mass of frightened spectators and, spite of the gloom, the deeper because of the glare preceding it, he reached the egress. The uninitiated would never have suspected its existence, for the actors and staff of the establishment alone had the right and knowledge to use it.
"Lights, lights!" the functionaries were shouting.
By the time matches were struck and lanterns brought into the scene of confusion, Claudius had opened the panel, leaped through and closed it. He did not dally in the passage, but hastened to follow the walled-in road as well as he might by which he had penetrated the theatrical region.
At the dividing-line, where the path parted to the men's and to the ladies' dressing-rooms, he perceived a ghostly figure in the obscurity which also prevailed here from the general extinction of the illuminant. He was about shrinking back and fleeing in another direction when eyes blazed in the dark like a cat's, and the sweet, unmistakable voice of the singer, who had enthralled him, ejaculated:
"As God lives, it is you!"
"Suppose it is I!" he returned, impatiently. "Stand aside, or—"
"You must not pass here!" she returned, laying her hands on his lifted arm.
"Must not? We shall see about that!" and he repulsed her violently.
"No, no; you are too hasty! I mean that would be a fatal course. Here, here!" seizing him again and dragging him with her. "You were right to kill that ruffian! to cane him to death—like the Russian grand-dukes, he was not born to die by the sword. To abduct one woman while paying court to another, the traitor! But, never heed that! He is punished, and you must be saved. Here is an outlet: pursue the passage to the end and leave the town!"
"But