Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, August, 1878Various
History
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, August, 1878
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
Hyacinthe went toward him, and the people, unused to seeing her there
for a long time past, hushed their talk, and one of them marked the
newness of the light that shone in her eyes and the happiness that
smiled on her lips as she came. He was a poet, and he went home and
made verses on her: he had never thought of such a thing before. She
raised the wreath of laurel from her brows and lifted it up to the
golden head of the man whose laugh she had caught. "My Saxon god!" she
murmured, so low that none heard her save him, and then, leaving the
crown on his head, she turned and walked away. She went home to the
shabby house in Craven street, which was still her home, and before
she slept she whispered to Miss Juliet, "I have found him."
In less than twenty-four hours the scene enacted in the green-room of
the theatre had been reported everywhere--first in the clubs, then
in all the salons--not last in the pretty boudoir of Lady Florence
Ffolliott.
Every night thereafter Hyacinthe saw her hero sitting in his stall: he
never missed once, but generally came in well on toward the end of the
performance. At the close of a fortnight, as she was making her way to
her room after the curtain had come down for the last time, she met
him face to face: he had planned it so.
"What would you?" she asked in the odd foreign fashion that clung to
her still, and showed itself when she was taken unawares.
"They say I need nothing;" and the blue eyes laugh down into hers.
"They say I need nothing now that I have been crowned by a King with
laurel-leaves." But even as he speaks the smile fades from his lips:
he sees no answering flash on hers.
"That is what you said in the Vatican that night," she says. "Is it
true?"
He begins to fear that she is losing her mind, but he speaks gently to
her: "Have we met before, then?"
Hyacinthe, standing between two dusty flies while the mirth of the
farce rings out from the stage, tells her dream, for the third time,
to-night to him. "Is it true that you need nothing?" she asks again,
raising anxious eyes to his.
For a moment the man wavers. Last night he would have laughed to scorn
the idea of _his_ not being ready with a pretty speech for a beautiful
actress: just now he is puzzled for a reply, and he knows full well
that some strange new jarring hand is sweeping the strings of his
life. "It is true," he sighs, remembering a true heart that loves
him. "I have wealth, position--these things first, for they breed the
rest," he says with a small sneer--"troops of friends and the promised
hand of a woman whom I have asked to marry me."
"I am sorry," she says at last with a child's sad, unconscious
inflection, "but all the same, I have found you. Cupid said I should."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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