Part 27 (1/2)

Her face, as she looked up at him, was so sweet and lovely, so throbbing with the pity of the little tale, that he could hesitate no longer.

”No,” he said, ”you shall not play me the music now. Listen, oh, my dear, listen instead to my story, because I love you!”

CHAPTER XVIII

A LOVER, AND NEWS OF LOVERS

Mary Marriott sat alone in her little flat at the top of the old house in Bloomsbury. The new year had begun, bright and cold from its very first day until the present--eight days after its birth.

The terrible fogs and depression of the old year had vanished as if they had never been. On such a morning as this was they seemed but a dim memory.

And yet how much had happened during those weeks when London lay under a leaden pall. For Mary at least they had been the most eventful weeks of her life.

Everything had been changed for her. From obscurity she had been given an unparalleled opportunity of gaining fame--swift and complete--a fame which some of the best judges in London told her was already a.s.sured.

Nor was this all, stupendous though it was. A few weeks ago she had been as friendless and lonely a girl as any in London; now she had troops of friends, distinguished, brilliant, and fascinating, and among all these kind people she was, as it were, upon a pedestal. They regarded her as a great artist, took her on trust as that; they regarded her also as a tremendous force to aid the victory of the Cause they had at heart.

And there was more even than this. In the old days her art had always been her one ideal in life. The art of the theatre was everything to her. It was so still, but it was welded and fused with another ideal.

Art for art's sake, just that and nothing more, was welded and fused with something new and uplifting. She saw how her art might become a means of definitely helping forward a movement which had for its object the relief of the down-trodden and oppressed, the doing away with poverty and misery, the ushering in--at last--of the Golden Age! She was to fulfil her artistic destiny, to do the work she came into the world to do, and at the same time to consecrate that work to the service of her sisters and brethren of England.

In all the socialistic ranks there was no more enthusiastic convert than this lovely and brilliant girl. She was singing now as she sat in her little room, and the crisp, bright winter suns.h.i.+ne poured into it; crooning an old Jacobite song, though her eyes were fixed upon the typewritten ma.n.u.script of her part in the new play at the Park Lane Theatre. Her ivory brow was wrinkled a little, for she was deep in thought over a detail of her work--should the voice drop at the end of that impressive line, or would not the excitement in which it was to be uttered give it a sharper and more staccato character?--it required thinking out.

The little sitting-room was not quite the same as it had been. Another bookshelf had been added, and it was filled with the literature of Socialism. On the top shelf was a long row of neat volumes bound in grey-green, the complete works of James Fabian Rose, presented to Mary by the author himself. All over the place ma.s.ses of flowers were blooming, pale mauve violets from the Riviera, roses of sulphur and blood-colour from Gra.s.se, striped carnations from Nice. Mary had many friends now who sent her flowers. They came constantly, and her tiny room was redolent of sweet odours. The walls of the room now bore legends painted upon them in quaint lettering. Mr. Conrad, the socialistic clergyman, Fabian Rose's friend, was clever with his brush, and had indeed decorated his church with fresco work. He had painted sentences and socialistic texts upon the walls of Mary's sitting-room.

”The rich and the poor meet together; the Lord is the maker of them all,” was taken from the Book of Proverbs and painted over the door.

Upon the board over the fire, painted in black letter, was this quotation from Sir Thomas More: ”I am persuaded that till property is taken away there can be no equitable or just distribution of things, nor can the world be happily governed, for so long as that is maintained the greatest and the far best of mankind will be still oppressed with a load of cares and anxieties.”

There were many other pregnant and pithy sayings upon the walls, and Mary, who used to speak of her cosy little attic as her ”sanctum” or ”nest,” now laughingly called it her ”Profession of faith.”

Mary also was not quite as she had been. A larger experience of life, new interests, new friends, and, above all, a new ideal had added to her grace and charm of manner, given fulness and maturity even to her beauty. More than ever she was marvellously and wonderfully alive, charged with a kind of radiant energy and force, a joyous power of true correspondence with environment which had made Conrad whisper to James Fabian Rose--one night in the house at Westminster: ”For she on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise.” Indeed, her experiences had been strangely varied and diversified during the last few weeks.

Rose and his friends had spared nothing in the effort to make her a very perfect instrument which should interpret their ideas to the world at large. They had found their task not only easy, but full of intense pleasure. The girl was so responsive, so quick to mark and learn, of such an enthusiastic and original temper of mind that her education on new lines was a specific joy, and their first hopes seemed already a.s.sured of fruition.

It was now only a few days before the play upon which so many hopes depended was to be produced at the Park Lane Theatre.

Already the whole of London was in a fever of curiosity about it. Mr.

Goodrick had begun the stimulation of public curiosity in the _Daily Wire_, Lionel Westwood had continued the work until the whole Press had interested itself and daily teemed with report, rumour, and conjecture.

Almost everyone in the metropolis knew that something quite out of the ordinary, unprecedented, indeed, in the history of the theatre was afoot. Absolutely correct information there was none. Goodrick was reserving full and accurate details for the day before the production, when the _Daily Wire_ promised a complete and authoritative statement of an absolutely exclusive kind.

The three facts which had leaked out in more or less correct fas.h.i.+on, and which were responsible for much of the eager curiosity of London, were the three essential ones. _The Socialist_, which was announced as the t.i.tle of the play, was known to be the first step in an organised attempt to use the theatre as a method of socialistic propaganda. It was also said that the play was indubitably the masterpiece of James Fabian Rose. This in itself was sufficient to attract marked interest.

Secondly, every one seemed to be aware that a young actress of extraordinary beauty and talent had been discovered in the provinces and was about to burst into the theatrical firmament as a full-fledged star, a new Duse or Bernhardt, a star of the first magnitude.

Again, there were the most curious rumours afloat in regard to the actual plot of the play. It was said that the whole scheme was nothing more or less than a virulent attack upon a certain great n.o.bleman who owned a large portion of the West End of London and whose name had been much in the public mouth of late. No newspaper had as yet ventured to print the actual name, but it was a more or less open secret that the Duke of Paddington was meant.

Mary had seen but little of the duke, and then she had thought his manner altered. She had met him once or twice at the Roses' house, and he seemed to her to have lost his usual serenity. He was as a man on whose mind something weighs heavily. Restless, and with a certain appeal in his eyes. He looked, Mary reflected upon one of these occasions, like a man who had made some great mistake and was beginning to find it out.

She had had little or no private talk with him except on one occasion, and then only for a moment.