Read Ebook: The Lady Evelyn: A Story of To-day by Pemberton Max Brown Arthur William Illustrator

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Ebook has 1158 lines and 77435 words, and 24 pages

These thoughts followed her to the supper room at the Carlton and were accountable for the indifference with which she listened to the praises and the prophecies of that truly great man, Mr. Charles Izard. He, wonderful being, confessed to himself that he could make nothing of the girl and that she was altogether beyond his experience. Her stately manners frightened him. When he called her, "my dear," as all women are called in the theatre, the words would sometimes halt upon his lips and he would hurriedly correct them and say, "Miss," instead. The first guess that he had made at her identity would have it that she was a country parson's daughter, or perhaps a relative of the agent or the steward of a Derbyshire estate. Now, however, he found himself of another opinion altogether, and there came to him the uneasy conviction that some great mystery lay behind his good fortune and would stand eventually between him and his hopes.

Now many of Mr. Charles Izard's friends visited his supper-table from time to time, and of these one or two were languid young men in quest of introductions. These stared at Etta, open-mouthed and rudely; but her host made short work of them and they ambled away, seeking whom they might devour elsewhere, but never with any ardor. Supper was almost done, indeed before anyone of sufficient importance to engage the great Charles Izard's attention made his appearance. At last, however, he hailed a stranger with some enthusiasm, and this at a moment when Etta was actually listening to a piteous narrative of Mrs. Charles' domestic achievements.

"Why, Count, what good fortune tossed you out of the blanket? Come and sit right here. You know my wife, of course?"

Mrs. Izard and Etta turned their heads together to see a somewhat pale youth with dark chestnut hair and wonderfully plaintive eyes--a youth whose dark skin and slightly eccentric dress proclaimed him unmistakably to be a foreigner; but one who was quite at home in any society in which he might find himself. The face was pleasing; the manners those of a man who has travelled far and has yet to learn the meaning of the word embarrassment. To Mr. Izard he extended a well-shaped hand upon which a ruby ring shone a little vulgarly, but to Etta he spoke with something of real cordiality in his tone.

"Why, Miss Romney," he exclaimed, his accent betraying a considerable acquaintance with Western America, "why, Miss Romney, we are no strangers surely?"

Etta colored visibly; but fearing a misconception of her momentary confusion, she said to Mrs. Izard:

"The Count and I ran into each other in the Strand the other day. I fear I was very clumsy."

"So little," said the Count, "that never shall I call a cab in London again without remembering my good fortune."

He drew a chair to Etta's side and sat so near to her that even the great man remarked the circumstance.

"That's how I'd like to see 'em sit down in my comedies," he remarked with real feeling. "The young men I meet can't take a chair, let alone fix themselves straight on it. You come along to me, Count, and I'll pay you a hundred dollars a week to be master of the ceremonies. Our stage manager used to do stunts on a bicycle. He thinks people should do the same on chairs."

Count Odin looked at the speaker a little contemptuously with the look of a man who never forgets his birthright or jests about it. To Etta he said with an evident intention of explaining his position:

"Mr. Izard crossed over with me the last time I have come from America. I remember that he had the difficulty with his chair on that occasion." And then he asked her--"Of course you have been across, Miss Romney; you know America, I will be sure?"

Etta answered him with simple candor, that she had travelled but little.

"I was educated in a convent. You may imagine what our travels were. Once every year we had a picnic on the Seine at Les Andlays. That's where I got my knowledge of the world," she said with a laugh.

"Then your ideas are of the French?" He put it to her with an object she could not divine, though she answered as quickly.

"They are entirely English both in my preferences and my friendships," was her reply, nor could she have told anyone why she put this affront upon him.

"She's going to make friends enough out yonder in the Fall," said Izard, whose quick ear caught the tone of their conversation. "I shall take this company over in September if we play to any money this side. Miss Romney goes with me, and I promise her a good time any way. America's the country for her talent. You've too many played-out actors over here. Most of them think themselves beautiful, and that's why their theatres close up."

He laughed a flattering tribute to his own cleverness, as much as to say--"My theatres never close up." Count Odin on his part smiled a little dryly as though he might yet have something to say to the proposed arrangement.

"Are you looking forward to the journey, Miss Romney?" he asked Etta in a low voice.

"I am not thinking at all about it," she said very truthfully.

"Then perhaps you are looking backward," he suggested, but in such a low tone that even Izard did not hear him.

When Etta turned her startled eyes upon him, he was already addressing some commonplace remark to his hostess, while Mr. Charles Izard amused himself by diligently checking the total of the bill.

"I could keep a steam yacht on what I pay for wine in this hotel," he remarked jovially, addressing himself so directly to the ladies that even his good dame protested.

"My dear Charles," she exclaimed, "you are not suggesting that I have drunk it?"

"Well, I hope some one has," was the affable retort. "Let's go and smoke. It's suffocating in here."

Etta had been greatly alarmed by the Count's remark, though she was very far from believing that it could bear the sinister interpretation which her first alarm had put upon it. This fear of discovery had dogged her steps since she quitted her home to embark upon as wild an adventure as a young girl ever set her hand to; but if discovery came, she reflected, it would not be at the bidding of a foreigner whom she had seen for the first time in her life but a few days ago. Such wisdom permitted her quickly to recover her composure, and she pleaded the lateness of the hour and her own fatigue as the best of reasons for leaving the hotel.

"I am glad you were pleased," she said to Izard, holding out her hand directly they entered the hall. "Of course it has all been very dreadful to me and I'm still in a dream about it. The newspapers will tell me the truth to-morrow, I feel sure of it."

He shook her hand and held it while he answered her.

"Don't you go thinking too much about the newspapers," he said, with a splendid sense of his own importance. "When Charles Izard says that a play's got to go, it's going, my dear, though the great William Shakespeare himself got out of his grave to write it down. You've done very well to-night and you'll do better when you know your way about the stage. Go home and sleep on that, and let the critics spread themselves as much as they please."

As before, when she had first come to the hotel, Mrs. Izard defied the warning glances thrown toward her by the man of business and repeated her honest praise of Etta's performance.

"It's years since I heard such enthusiasm in a theatre," she admitted; "why, Charles was quite beside himself. I do believe you made him cry, my dear."

The mere suggestion that the great man could shed tears under any circumstances whatever appealed irresistibly to Count Odin's sense of humor.

"Put that in the advertisement and you shall have all the town at your theatre. An impressario's tears! They should be gathered in cups of jasper and of gold. But I imagine that they will be," he added gayly before wishing Etta a last good-night.

Etta looked him straight in the eyes and said, "Good-night."

TWO PERSONALITIES

Etta Romney was very early awake upon the following morning; and not for the first time since she had come to London did her environment so perplex her that some minutes passed before she could recall the circumstances which had brought her to that square room and made her a stranger in a house of strangers.

Leaping up with a young girl's agility, she drew the blind aside and looked out upon deserted Bedford Square, as beautiful in that early light of morning as Bedford Square could ever be.

How still it all was! Not a footfall anywhere. No milk carts yet to rattle by and suggest the busy day. Nothing but a soft sunshine upon the drawn blinds, a lonely patch of grass beneath lonely trees, and great gaunt houses side by side and so close together that each appeared to be elbowing its neighbor for room in which to stand upright.

Etta returned to her bed and crouched upon it like a pretty wild animal, half afraid of the day. A whole troop of fears and hopes rushed upon her excited brain. What had she done? Of what madness had she not been guilty? To-day the newspapers would tell her. If they told her father also--her father whom she believed to be snug in distant Tuscany--what then, and with what consequences to herself! A fearful dread of this came upon her when she thought of it. She hid her eyes from the light and could hear her own heart beating beneath the bed-clothes.

She was not Etta now, but knew herself by another name, the name of Evelyn, which in this mood of repentance became her better, she thought. True, she had been Etta when she appeared before the people last night, the wild mad Etta, given to feverish dreams in her old Derbyshire home and trying to realize them here amid the garish scenes of London's dramatic life. But arrayed in the white garb of momentary penitence, she was Evelyn, the good nun's pupil; the docile gentle Evelyn awaiting the redemption of her father's promise that the gates of the world should not be shut forever upon her youth, but should open some day to the galleries of a young girl's pleasure. It was the Etta in her which made her impatient and unable to await the appointed time; the Etta which broke out in this mad escapade, ever trembling upon the brink of discovery and fearful in its possibilities of reproach and remorse. But the Evelyn reckoned up the consequences and was afraid of them.

She could not sleep again although it was then but six o'clock of the morning, and she lay for more than an hour listening to those growing sounds which are the overture of a London day. Workmen discussing politics, amiably, if in strident tones, went by with heavy tread upon their way to shop or factory. Milk carts appeared with their far from musical accompaniment of doleful cries and rattling cans. An amorous policeman conducted flirtations dexterously with various cooks, and passed thence with sad step. Then came the postman with his cheery rat-tat at nearly every house; the newsboy with the welcome cry of "piper"; the first of the cabs, the market carts, the railway vans, each contributing something to that voice of tumult without which the metropolis would seem to be a dead city.

Etta sat up in her bed once more when she heard the newsboy in the square. The papers! Was it possible that they would tell the public all about last night's performance; that her name would figure in them; that she would be praised or blamed according to the critics' judgment? The thought made her heart beat. She had been warned by that great man, Mr. Charles Izard, not to pay too much attention to what the papers said; but how could she help doing so? A woman is rarely as vain as a man, but in curiosity she far surpasses him. Etta was just dying of curiosity to read what the critics said about her when old Mrs. Wegg, her landlady, appeared with her morning tea; and this good dame she implored to bring up the newspapers at once.

"I can't wait a minute, Mrs. Wegg," she said, for, of course, the old lady knew that she was a "theatrical." "Do please send Emma up at once--it's absolute torture."

The excellent Mrs. Wegg, who had her own ideas of newspaper reading, expressed her sympathy in motherly language:

"Ah, I feel that way myself about the stories in 'Snippets,'" she said. "I assure you, my dear, that when the Duke of Rochester ran away with the hospital nurse, I couldn't sleep in my bed at night for wanting to know what had become of her. I'll send Emma up this minute--the lazy, good-for-nothin', gossipin' girl she is, to be sure. Now, you drink up your tea and don't worrit about it. I've known them that can't act a bit praised up to the sky by the crickets. I'm sure they'll say something nice about you."

She waddled from the room leaving Etta to intolerable moments of suspense. When the newspapers came, a very bundle which she had ordered yesterday, she grabbed them at hazard, and catching up one of the morning halfpenny papers immediately read the disastrous headline, "Poor Play at the Carlton." So it was failure after all, then! Her heart beat wildly; she hardly had the courage to proceed.

POOR PLAY AT THE CARLTON

BUT

A PERSONAL TRIUMPH FOR MISS ROMNEY

The Old Story of Haddon Hall Again

The Star Which Did Not Fail To Shine

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