The Lady Evelyn Part 2

CHAPTER II

ETTA ROMNEY IS PRESENTED

The new play, "Haddon Hall," had been announced for half-past eight precisely on the evening of Wednesday, the twentieth day of May. It still wanted a few minutes to the hour of eight when that famous American impressario, Mr. Charles Izard, permitted a waiter in the Carlton Hotel to serve him with a coffee and liqueur; while he confided to his invaluable confederate and stage-manager, Mr. Walter Lacombe, the a.s.suring intelligence that he had no doubt either about the play or the company.

"They're ho-mo-gen-e-us," he said, lighting a cigar with comfortable deliberation; "the first act's bully and any play with that Third Act I produce. We must get something written for her to follow in. My side will take "Haddon Hall" and it will take Etta Romney. If it doesn't, I close up."

Mr. Lacombe, the stage-manager, had his own doubts, but he was far too diplomatic to express them.

"When you close up, I sell bananas," said he; "that will be in the Ides of March."

Mr. Charles Izard, who had not enjoyed the distinction of three years'

idleness at Cambridge (and so had made a vast fortune), produced those strange concatenations of sounds which served him for laughter before uttering a pious wish.

"It's the 'ides of the critics' I'd like to touch," he exclaimed with real feeling; "you know what they're going to say about this as well as I do----"

"Oh, of course," said Lacombe frankly, "they'll baste it, sure enough.

No historical play is likely to please Watley. He'll say that hot blankets are the proper treatment."

"I'd like to wrap him up in 'em and smother him," interjected Mr.

Charles Izard, still piously.

"That's so--he's capable _de tout_. But I fancy he will take her none the less."

"Etta Romney, why yes! I'd like to see the man who wouldn't take her.

It's a woman that makes a play nowadays. If you'd more of 'em this side, you wouldn't have so many failures. In America we star the woman first and the play afterwards. Here you star the man and when all the schoolgirls have seen him, your theatre's empty."

"Exactly--this play is the exception. You've certainly cut the writing on the wall. There's no room for whiskers on your ideas."

Mr. Izard drained his coffee cup and admitted loftily that there was not.

"I'd have been a fool not to. Here's a girl comes to me out of the _ewigkeit_. No name, no story, nothing. Won't tell me who she is or where she has played before. Just says, 'I've read about Constant Hayter's play--I know Derbyshire; I have loved the tradition of that story all my life. Money is nothing to me. Let me play the part Miss Fay Warner has given up. Let me play it at rehearsal, and then say whether you wish me to go on.' You couldn't better it in a fairy book.

I see her act a scene, hear her speak twenty lines, and say, 'That's bully.' She doesn't ask a salary--why, sir, the girl's a genius born and bred--and what's more she's a lady from the top of her hat to the soles of her boots. I couldn't wish my own daughter to behave better."

"Something odd about her all the same," Lacombe reflected; "dreadfully afraid of being known. She goes in and out of the theatre like a ghost."

Mr. Charles Izard laughed again.

"Well, don't she play the part of one?" he asked affably. "How would you have her come in and out? Whistling like the overhead? The part's herself--the Lady of Haddon. She was born to it. If that girl hasn't walked as a ghost sometime or other, put me down for twenty pounds to an hospital. And no salary, sir, not a single penny."

"Immense," said Lacombe, but immediately paused as a well-known critic pa.s.sed through the hall and went out to the theatre almost adjoining the hotel.

"There's Clayaton," he went on quickly, "it's not often he sits out a sword-and-cape drama."

"Then he'll sit out one to-night and be ashamed of himself in the morning. Let's get, my boy, it's just on the half-hour. We must be there."

What precisely would have happened had so great a man not been there, the merely humble individual might hardly dare to say. As events went, Mr. Charles Izard put on a light great-coat with a great deal of splendid ceremony, and giving the many-colored lackey a shilling, strolled pompously into the street with his cigar still alight.

Pa.s.sing His Majesty's, before whose doors the boards "House Full" were conspicuously displayed, the pair walked leisurely on to the front entrance of the Carlton Theatre, and were there gratified by one of those spectacles which London alone can display upon the first night of a new production.

Cabs, carriages, electric broughams, even the motor-cars, arrived in quick succession before the brightly lighted vestibule of one of the prettiest theatres in London. From these emerged women in blazing evening dress, men who had dined, and men capricious and irritable because they had not dined--young girls to whom all plays were a dream of delight, mere boys who already had voted the whole thing "rot." As for the critics, they were chiefly patrons of hansoms; though a few arrived on foot, two and two, each trying to learn what the other would say about a performance which many had witnessed at a dress rehearsal.

Short men and tall men, bearded men and bald men, they cared nothing for the success of the play, but everything for the glory of the notices they must write. An historical drama could not fail to give them a fine opening. They lolled back easily in their stalls as men whose literary knives were for the moment sheathed, but would be busy anon.

The theatre was packed to the very ceiling when the curtain rose, and few of the amiable first-nighters were missing from the audience.

Famous lawyers, doctors of letters, and doctors of medicine, editors of ill.u.s.trated papers and editors of papers that were not ill.u.s.trated, literary ladies and ladies who were not literary, novelists, essayists, poets, that curious quasi-Bohemian crowd which const.i.tutes a London first-night house, stood for most of the arts and many of the sciences of our day; and yet in the main brought a child's heart to the play as Bohemian crowds will. The cynics of eighteen, mostly representing halfpenny evening papers, were among the few who denounced the drama before they had seen it. "'Haddon Hall' on the stage again--why," said they, "there have been twenty Di Vernons in our time and why should this Di Vernon find mercy?" She was already in the coach of failure so far as they were concerned. The curtain rose upon their mutterings and did not still them.

It was a pretty scene, the park of famous Haddon Hall and the meeting between pretty Dorothy Vernon and her young lover beneath the sheltering yews. The unknown _debutante_, Etta Romney, received a lukewarm welcome from the audience; but all admitted the grace of her att.i.tudes, the charm of her voice, and the earnestness she brought to her a.s.sistance. A little amateurish in the earlier moments of the play she warmed to her work anon; and a love scene which would have been ridiculous had it been ill-played, she lifted by natural talent to a pinnacle at least of toleration. So the curtain fell to some applause; and the great impressario, Mr. Charles Izard, again ventured the opinion that she was "bully," though his voice had not that confident ring it possessed at the dinner-table. Could the girl make a failure of it, after all? It was just possible. And undoubtedly the play was not a masterpiece.

So the Second Act pa.s.sed and found him not a little anxious, and he sat far back in his box when the curtain rose upon the Third and concentrated his whole attention upon the performance. The scene was that of the Long Gallery at Haddon; the episode, a midnight meeting between Dorothy and her lover. Dressed in spotless white with the softest black hair tumbling about her almost to her knees, young and supple limbs moving elegantly, a face that Reynolds might have loved to paint, a voice that was music to hear--nevertheless all these physical attributes were speedily forgotten in the sincerity of Etta Romney's acting and the human feeling which animated it. Here was one who loved every stone of this ancient house which the quivering canvas attempted to portray; who had wandered abroad often in its stately park, who spoke the tongue of three centuries ago more naturally than her own, who had been so moved by this story of Di Vernon's life that she gave her very soul to its re-telling. From amazement the audiences pa.s.sed quickly to a kind of entrancement which only genius can command. It did not applaud; its silence was astounding--not a whisper, scarce the rustle of a dress could be heard. The spell growing, it followed the white figure from scene to scene; was unconscious, perhaps, that any other than she trod the stage; devoured her with amazed eyes; heard, for the first time, each a tale of mediaeval England as neither historian nor romancer had ever told. When the curtain fell, the people still sat in silence a little while; but the applause came at length, upon a tempest of wild excitement rarely known in a modern theatre.

Who was she? Whence had she come?

A hundred ready tongues asked the question which none appeared able to answer.

There was but one man in the house who made sure of Etta Romney's ident.i.ty, and he was a Roumanian.

Count Odin had witnessed the girl's _debut_ from a box on the second tier.

"She is a great actress," he said to his companion, Felix Horowitz, a young attache from the Hungarian Emba.s.sy; "I am going to make love to her."

The young man looked up quickly.

"I promise you failure," he said--"a woman who can speak of England like that will marry none but an Englishman."

CHAPTER III

SUCCESS AND AFTERWARDS

Etta Romney sat in her little dressing-room when the play was over, so very tired after all she had done that even the congratulations of Mr.

Charles Izard failed to give her pleasure.

Unlike the successful actress of our time, she had not yet attracted the attention of the "flower" brigade, as little Dulcie Holmes, one of her friends in the theatre, would call them; and despite her success and the astonishment it had provoked, no baskets of roses decorated her dressing-table, nor were expensive bouquets thrown "negligently" to the various corners of the room. Two red roses in a cheap vase; a bunch of narcissi, which had obviously come from the flower-girls of the Criterion, witnessed her triumph in lonely majesty. Even the redoubtable Mr. Izard, not antic.i.p.ating the splendor of the evening, had forgotten to "command" a basket for his star. He, good man, had but one word for his surprising fortune. "It's bully," he said--and repeated the conviction _usque ad nauseam_.

Etta sat alone, but it was not for many minutes after the curtain fell.

Little Dulcie Holmes, the artist's daughter, who had a "walking part"

at twenty-four shillings a week, came leaping into the room presently and catching her friend in both arms kissed her rapturously.

"Oh, Etta," she cried ardently, "oh, my dear--they won't go away even now. Can't you hear them calling for you?"

"They are too kind to me," was the quiet response, "and all because I love Derbyshire. Isn't it absurd?--but, of course, I'm very pleased, Dulcie."

"Think of it, dear Etta. Your very first night and Mr. Izard in such a state that he'd give you a hundred a week if you asked him. Of course, you won't play for nothing now, Etta."

"I've never thought of it," said Etta still without apparent emotion ... and then with a very sweet smile, she asked, "What would you say if I told you that I was about to give up the theatre altogether, Dulcie?"