CHAPTER XIII.
Two days later, at a quarter past ten in the morning, to be exact, Sprague half opened his eyes on a pink mist slightly tinged with yellow.
At first this rather surprising color scheme had a soothing effect, and he lay quite still, under the drowsy impression that he was watching a sunset over Sydney Heads. Presently, however, this phenomenon presenting itself to his drowsy intelligence as a physical impossibility from the Gray's Inn Road, he opened his eyes a little wider, and was confronted at close range with a segment of the bedroom wall paper in all its hideousness. Of course, that was intended to represent a yellow basket overflowing with pink roses; and this—this was the morning after the first night of “Lorette.”
What a wonderful performance it had been! He could still see the narrow backwater of the Strand as it had been the night before, and as he had tried to picture it a hundred times—imbued with scintillating life; the toy-like auditorium, with its sea of dim, white faces all turned in the same direction—toward Lorette—his Lorette—and all held captive by her charm. He recalled the face of a' cabinet minister in a box as he turned to his wife at the fall of the second curtain; it told him far plainer than words that “Lorette' was good, and his blood surged again at the thought.
To be sure, the applause had hardly been thunderous, but the elimination of the pit and the gallery accounted for that; ladies could hardly be expected to burst guinea gloves; and gentlemen—well, the London gentleman is seldom demonstrative. Also, there had been no call for author; but this had been nothing more than a genuine relief to Sprague. Lorette—his Lorette —had appeared twice after the first two acts, and three times after the last, to bow her acknowledgments; and what more could be expected or desired? Then the critics With a bound, Sprague was out of bed and into the tiny sitting room.
Stone was seated before the fire, reading the newspaper. A comprehensive cigar was securely wedged in the corner of his mouth, and his long legs, culminating in their ungainly feet, dangled like overweighted pendulums from the arm of the chair.
Sprague laughed. He advanced on Stone, executing a hornpipe like a maniac, and laughed still louder when the American gazed up at him without a semblance of a smile. He slapped him on the back like a fool, and laughed again at his discomfiture. The world—even the Gray's Inn Road—was an intensely amusing place that morning.
“Stone,” he said, assuming a Napoleonic attitude on the hearthrug, “I have arrived!”
The American regarded him fixedly for a few seconds, and then smiled; but he was not amused; it was the same smile of compassion that Sprague had come to know so well that accompanied the extension of a work-worn hand.
“I'm glad,” he said; “very glad.”
“What do they say?” Sprague snatched up the paper, and, turning to the notices, read aloud:
- “After an interval of nearly six months, the Olympic opened its doors last night to the legion of Miss Nina Holmes' admirers; and if any proof of that charming actress-manager's popularity were needed, last night's performance unquestionably supplied it. Her welcome, after so long an absence from the notoriously fickle theatergoing public, was as warmly spontaneous as a particularly brilliant audience could make it”
Sprague's eye drifted down the column, impatient to catch some mention of “Lorette,” and near the bottom, consigned to the last paragraph, he found it:
- “The play, 'Lorette,' described as a drama in three acts, by still another of those 'unknowns' whom Miss Holmes delights to lift from obscurity, proved a suitable vehicle for her versatile talent”
Sprague tossed the paper impatiently aside, and picked up another.
“'Suitable vehicle!'” he muttered.
Stone leaned forward and flicked his cigar ash into the fire.
Sprague continued:
- “Miss Holmes is with us again, and not content with past achievements in the realm of theatrical experiment—the consistent production of plays with nothing more than their title to recommend them to 'first-night' audiences—she now returns, invigorated by a six months' rest, to essay the apparently impossible. More than one London manager has attempted to dispense with the cheaper parts of his theater, and has ultimately bowed his acknowledgment of defeat to the man in the street; yet last night the Olympic took up the cudgels and staked its all on box, stall, and dress circle. It is a daring innovation, but Miss Holmes is a daring woman, and it remains to be seen whether the brilliant audience of last night.... The name part of 'Lorette' was obviously written for Miss Holmes, and suits her special endowments as an emotional actress to a marked degree.... Her delicate handling of the trying scene in Act III. was particularly fine”
Sprague muttered something unintelligible, and tossed paper the into an empty chair.
“What a blessing it is that it doesn't make a hap'orth of difference what they say—or, rather, don't say,” he observed.
“It seems to me,” said Stone between meditative puffs at his cigar, “that things are much the same here as across the 'pond.' It's the actor whom the people roll up to see, not the play. But—I shouldn't worry if I were you.”
“I'm not.” Sprague stood with a pyjamaed elbow on the mantelpiece and looked into the fire. “And it rather surprises me that I'm not. It ought to worry me considerably, one way and another. I discovered the day before yesterday that I haven't a stiver in the world; so you see what 'Lorette' ought to mean to me now, quite apart from that 'cheap destiny' of mine.”
Stone looked up at him.
Good heavens!” he drawled. “Do you mean to say you'll have to subsist on 'Lorette'?”
“Yes—until I have written something else. But you may remember I intended to 'go on and on' in any case, so that part of the program remains unaltered. You don't think the prospect particularly cheerful?”
“How much did you get for that play?”
A hundred down, and an agreement for royalties on every performance over forty.”
“Have you sold the American rights?”
“No. Do you think there's a chance?”
Stone threw his cigar butt into the fender, and slowly drew his elongated legs into a more natural attitude.
“I'll give you two hundred down, and royalties on the English basis, for them,” he said.
For a moment Sprague looked down at the sprawling figure in the deep arm-chair; then he gave a short laugh.
“I'm not down to charity yet,” he said. “When I am, I won't forget you.”
The color slowly mounted to Stone's face.
“Charity be hanged!” he said. “The insufferable airs of you Englishmen!”
“Well, what in thunder can you want with my play?”
“I'll tell you that when the bargain's closed.”
“From lumberjack to play promoter!” Sprague quoted.
“You must remember Stone suggested mildly, “that I wasn't always a lumberjack.”
“It's good of you,” said Sprague more gravely, “but I can see through it, old man.” He turned and pressed the bell button beside the fireplace, then stood at the window looking down into the busy street.
With the arrival of breakfast his spirits regained their normal level.
“Personally,” he announced, attacking a thick slice of underdone bacon, “I look upon 'Lorette' as a howling success until I hear to the contrary; and to-night we celebrate, Stone. Nothing short of a music hall and supper at the Savoy. Oh, it's not a bit of use you wagging your head like that.”
And it was not.
That evening the two men stood watching the ballet from the promenade at the Empire. Sprague watched the American's face closely, for it still interested him to note the slow stages by which Stone was being coaxed back to a normal outlook on life, and his face showed nothing but undisguised boredom.
At the end of the item he turned.
“There are worse lives than the lumberjack's,” he observed laconically, his pale-blue eyes wandering round the semicircle of the promenade, where passed the endless procession of painted ghosts enveloped in a kindly obliterating cloud of tobacco smoke, down into the well of the auditorium, whence rose the continuous din of laughter, popping corks, and more smoke.
It's all rather beastly, isn't it?” added reflectively.
They passed through the open glass doors of the crowded buffet, and sat one of the little round tables in a corner, where they were presently joined—without invitation—by a travesty of a young girl in short skirts and a pair of very small and very shiny shoes that were evidently hurting her horribly. Stone blushed to the roots of his hair, and from that moment became the target of the woman's attention. Blushes in the “prom”! Sprague saw that she was staggered with their possibilities.
Amurrica, you bet! Didn't she just know God's own country from Frisco to little old Noo York?
At this juncture Sprague ventured to suggest that New York was neither little nor old, but very big and very new; but he was promptly warned of his trespass by a lightning lowering of a penciled eyelid.
Amurricans know how to treat women, you bet! If only she could get back—if only And to think that a bit of paper would do the stunt! She had the rest saved by working overtime on a typewriter Here she saw for the first time what Sprague had noticed a few seconds before; Stone was sitting as one petrified—a man dead save for his eyes, which were fixed in an uncanny stare on a table in the opposite corner.
“Wake up, man!” Sprague called. “We've got to drink this.”
Stone did not answer. Sprague studied his face; it was hard and set; curious, drawn lines hovered about the mouth; and in the garish light of the chandelier Sprague saw that it was bloodless. He followed the direction of the American's gaze, and found it centered upon a tall, overdressed woman, who was alternately sipping crême de menthe and talking earnestly to a vacuous youth in evening dress.
The instant he looked at the face Sprague knew that he had seen it before; yet for a full minute his mind refused to supply the connection; then in a flash it came to him, full, strong, undeniable; the hair was no no longer parted in the middle, but piled high in glistening coils to the brim of an over-feathered hat—that was the difference, almost the sole difference, between the face at the table and the face in the locket Stone had shown him on the deck of the Orontes.
The lady of the shiny shoes gulped the contents of her glass, and rose with an injured air. Stone did not notice her as she hobbled from the buffet; Sprague tried to think. Watching the American's profile across the table, he conjured up in his mind's eye the picture that was burning into the man's brain, obliterating, casting out, one after the other, the ideas that had held him chained so long. “Disease, smallpox, anything!” what were they to this? And as yet he saw her only at a distance, set off by the artful lighting of the buffet; for the cure to be complete, wait until
“Some one you know?” Sprague queried, and Stone moved, but the words conveyed nothing to him. He rose slowly and crossed the room. Another “turn” was on, and it was almost empty now, so that Sprague saw all that passed.
Stone had almost reached the table before the woman looked up, and then the blood ebbed from her face entirely; the penciled eyebrows and lids, even the powder, seemed to stand out in relief against the gray parchment of her face. They gazed at each other for what seemed an age to Sprague; then Stone moistened his lips.
“Where is he?” he demanded, in a voice low, even, and unusually distinct.
The question seemed to break the spell, and the youth, scenting a scene, evaporated through the buffet doors into the semidarkness of the promenade. The woman's head bent slowly forward, her hands flew to her face, for a second she rallied, and a sickly smile twisted her lips, then she collapsed entirely.
Sprague left them.
Outside, in Leicester Square, underneath the stars, he lit a cigar, and tried to laugh.
“Fate plays a rough game sometimes—but, heavens, how thorough!” he mused, turning mechanically toward Charing Cross Road. “Poor old Stone! Perhaps he will come out of his shell now. Poor old Stone!”
Sprague waited up for him with a pipe and his thoughts, and it was one o'clock before he appeared. His face was set in its accustomed gravity as he sank into a chair, crossed his bony knees, and swung a ponderous foot slowly up and down.
“I'm sorry you were dragged into the affair like that,” he apologized at last. “Of course you recognized her?”
“My dear fellow, don't mention it,” Sprague blurted hurriedly. “I was glad—I mean, I only hope you won't take it too much to heart, that you will see what I meant—now”
Stone studied him with a slight air of puzzlement, and flicked his cigar ash into the fender.
“We shall go to America,” he said slowly, “if I succeed.”
“Succeed? I don't quite follow.”
“In persuading her to become my wife,” said Stone.