CHAPTER XII.
For three weeks Sprague was lost in a whirl of activities that rendered him impervious to the worst a London February could do.
A dank, yellow fog might wrap the already unlovely Gray's Inn Road in a still more unlovely mantle, obliterating the lights from fish and fried-sausage shop windows before they had struggled six yards; a biting, rain-laden wind might sweep the gloomy thoroughfare from end to end, filling the gutters with a muddy torrent, and searching for the very marrow of the helpless pedestrian; yet Sprague walked in the sunshine of impending accomplishment; he was “on the edge of things”; and for him the London that he loved had never been more alluring.
There were, of course, the inevitable moments of doubt, ghastly hiatuses in his usually optimistic outlook, when it seemed inconceivable that “Lorette” could interest, much less move, the drab, unimaginative-looking multitudes he passed in the streets; but at such times Miss Holmes was a never-failing bulwark of encouragement.
“My dear man,” she would say, “those are not the people we cater for. Wait till you see a first-night audience at the Olympic, and you'll understand.”
Stone, too, with his almost uncanny imperturbability, was something of a comfort. He took a sort of tolerant interest in the rehearsals, attending them in much the same spirit as a mother would accompany her son to a football match; but he was always there, and always the same, conveying to Sprague a subtle air of companion- ship devoid of those mystifying moods that we so often notice in others and so seldom in ourselves.
One afternoon, on his way to the theater, Sprague met his father in the Strand, and for the first time it occurred to him that he had failed to pay his duty call at the Metropole.
Father and son shook hands without emotion; these rare and uninspiring meetings had occurred before. Mr. Sprague was a sleek, elderly gentleman with a weakness for golf and Harris tweeds in the summer, and Piccadilly and a malacca cane in the winter.
“You don't look a day older, sir,” his son observed.
Mr. Sprague beamed, and led the way into Short's.
“I don't feel it, my boy,” he replied. “What brought you back?”
“The Orontes, about three weeks ago.”
“But what have you been doing?”
“Writing a play.”
Mr. Sprague grunted, and sipped his sherry.
“Millicent Waring is engaged to young Duprez,” he announced irrelevantly.
“Thank God!” said Sprague.
His father's ruddy complexion took on a slightly deeper hue.
“John,” he said, “you annoy me intensely.”
The younger man slowly consumed a biscuit.
“I know,” he answered; “I'm sorry, but it's simple enough to avoid one another, isn't it?”
“Are you content to go drifting on in this aimless way all your life?”
“I prefer it to marrying money. Besides, I don't look upon it as aimless. My play is being produced at the Olympic to-morrow night.”
If this announcement was intended to impress, it signally failed in its object.
“Play—pshaw!” snapped Mr. Sprague. “What'll you be at next? And what's to happen to the manor? You know how things stood before you left last time; well, to put it mildly, they're no better.”
“My dear father, is that my fault?”
“Yes; you should have married Millicent; you owed it to the manor, to me, to yourself.”
Sprague smiled whimsically.
“If I owed it to myself,” he said slowly, “I'm glad I didn't foreclose. I owe you and the manor nothing. After paying for my education, the mater left me enough to crawl on, as you know; and I have had to crawl most of my life; now that I mean to fly, you can hardly blame me for choosing my own wings, can you?”
Mr. Sprague tugged thoughtfully at a becoming gray mustache.
“By wings I suppose you mean this play of yours?” he suggested.
“Yes.”
“I asked because you may have to test their strength pretty severely.” Mr. Sprague twisted his wineglass by its stem, while his son reflected that he had seldom seen him so pensive.
“I mean, you don't expect me to—er—leave you anything?”
“Not a stiver,” said Sprague cheerfully.
“And—er—you're not relying on your annuity indefinitely?”
“To tell you the truth, I hadn't thought about it; but, yes, I understood the mater left me two hundred and fifty a year for life.”
“She did—of course, dependent on the capital remaining intact; but I see you haven't yet heard from Parker & Dods.”
“I have been six weeks at sea.”
“Of course that accounts for it. I hope you won't be greatly disappointed, but”
The rest Sprague heard intermittently through a kind of mental haze. The truth had flashed in on him with a suddenness that was rather blinding, and there was really no need to listen to the cool phrases of the well-dressed elderly gentleman across the table—“unavoidable”—new taxes”—“mortgaged to the hilt”—to know that he was practically penniless.
For a moment white-hot anger burned in his throat, but he quenched it with a laugh, realizing its impotence against a nature such as his father's.
“You take it well, John,” observed that gentleman, in tones of admiration; “it's the way of the Spragues—but I hardly expected you to laugh.”
“It's so amusing,” said Sprague. He chuckled and crushed a biscuit between finger and thumb. “You steal my money, and then expect me to condole with you because you've spent it all. Can't you see the humor of it?”
Apparently Mr. Sprague could not. He even attempted an air of offended dignity until he read the futility of it in his son's face.
“We're in the same boat, John,” he said; then, in a conciliatory undertone: “You must see now why I was so anxious over the Millicent Waring affair; there are others, and we must make the most of our opportunities while we have appearances to back us up.”
“Then I'll leave them in your hands, sir,” said Sprague, with ghastly cheerfulness. “A man is as old as he looks, you know, and with your charm of manner and—yes, we can say appearance—you should have no difficulty. Personally I'd get out and work with my hands first.”
He had risen, and was reaching for his gloves when it occurred to him that something about the words he had just uttered sounded vaguely familiar.
“Travel seems to have rather altered your views,” his father observed, with a slight elevation of the eyebrows—and the delicate thread of memory was broken.
“It has,” said Sprague. “Good-by.” As he passed out into the hurrying Strand, his father noticed that he glanced down at the floor behind him.
“John is certainly touched,” he mused, and sighed as he drew an engagement book from his waistcoat pocket.
Sprague hurried on to the theater in the mixed company of his thoughts. The chance meeting with his father had simply shown him that he could no longer be a dabbler, dipping into work when and where he pleased. It must be real work now, a hard, ceaseless grind for his daily bread. He laughed at the thought that a paltry two hundred and fifty a year could so completely alter the aspect of things. But there was the play—always the play—and that “Lorette” meant more than ever to him now was a thought that only served to stimulate its author.
The Olympic is a tiny theater—a fad theater some people called it—situated off the Strand. Externally, with its white portico, marble steps, and highly varnished swinging doors, it lends a relieving splash of color to an otherwise drab and featureless row of typical London offices. Internally, it is as attractive as the whim of a tasteful woman can make it. Before passing down the narrow alley leading to the stage door Sprague looked about him, marveling, not for the first time, at the powers of the magician who could line that street with waiting carriages and throng the unpretentious foyer with all the brilliance of a West End theater crowd.
From the wings he could see her seated in a Louis Quinze chair, carrying on an animated dialogue with a blasé-looking gentleman in a frock coat. This was Paul Howard, known to theater-going London as “Nina Holmes' leading man” and “a dear.”
The rehearsal was going well, as far as Sprague could see, but they had so disfigured his poor “Lorette” that he had long since abandoned protest, and resigned himself to the knowledge that at rehearsals no one is in less request than the author of the piece.
Presently a minor character entered, and in some way inexplicable to Sprague raised the ire of a stout little man who sat in the third row of the stalls, apparently asleep. He sprang from the shadows of the auditorium like an overdeveloped spook.
“No, no, no!” he roared; and the minor character quailed, while that martinet of stage managers, William Saunderson, dashed onto the stage and assumed an attitude utterly preposterous for his size and figure. “So—don't you see? So!”
And William Saunderson was right; Sprague could see the subtle difference when the girl, with tears in her eyes, did as she was bid.
During a wait Sprague caught a weary smile from Nina Holmes, and went over to her side.
“You're tired,” he said.
“Dog,” replied the actress. “But it goes well, don't you think?
“I'm no judge of the revised version,” he answered, smiling; “but what suits Saunderson ought to suit me.”
Miss Holmes threw up her hands after a manner of her own.
“What do you think he called the Upland woman to-day?”
“Haven't the faintest.”
The actress whispered into Sprague's ear, and he stiffened perceptibly.
“Some one ought to murder the little beast,” he said.
“If they did, we should lose the best stage manager in London. No, no, my gallant Queenscliff playwright, for such slings and arrows of outrageous stage managers are we actresses fitted with the beauty of Venus, the grace of Diana, and the hide of a rhinoceros. But, talking of Queenscliff, look what I received this morning.”
She drew a newspaper clipping from her chatelaine bag, and Sprague read with the aid of a bunch light:
- Married.—At St. Michael's Church, Manly, on January 30th, Margaret, only daughter of Samuel Bettington, The White House, Queenscliff, to Frank J. Walker, of Manly.
Something rushed over his face and was gone so swiftly that even Nina Holmes failed to catch its meaning.
“Sacrilege!” he muttered, returning her the cutting. “Who sent it to you?”
But he failed to hear the answer. His eyes were on the stage, but he saw nothing of the play in progress. The first thing of which he was conscious was the word “cure” uttered by Miss Holmes as she hurried back to her part, and the bite of the wind that met him in the street.
It was the strangest thing! He could have sworn the girl had never entered his thoughts for the past two months; yet now he saw her as clearly as if in the flesh—married to Walker!
Stone's silent companionship was a comfort that evening. He had spent three consecutive days at the British Museum, a departure that Sprague had welcomed as the first sign of awakening interest in things practical; and now, arrayed in a lurid dressing gown, sat before a roaring fire, reading of the wonders he had seen.
For a long time Sprague sat, chin in hand, staring into the grate; the leaping flames conjured many pictures—a sunny beach, a blue kimono, and a laughing, boyish face—a black, ragged-coated dog of doubtful origin—and again the beach, but wrapped in a soft semidarkness—and again the boyish face, but upturned to his, with a smile that he would never quite forget.
He dispelled the memory with an effort, and fell to studying his companion's rugged profile against the green shade of the reading lamp. The little picture, framed by the surrounding darkness, was almost symbolical strength in repose. “I must be different somehow, a man in a thousand. The other nine hundred and ninety-nine would look upon it as a misfortune—perhaps it is—but I can't—I can't love and ride away.” Was it possible that Stone was wrong—that there were others in that nine hundred and ninety-nine—like that? Was it possible
Stone closed the book and turned in his chair.
“How goes 'Lorette'?” he asked.
Sprague was savagely poking the fire.