Part 9 (1/2)

She handed him a little volume of poems; he glanced at the t.i.tle and made a faint grimace. They were his own.

Nevertheless, he read for an hour, till the streets below grew silent, and his own voice, unaccustomed to such exercise, lost something of its usual clearness. Then he laid the volume down, and there was silence between them.

”I have been thinking,” he said at last, ”of a singular incident in connection with your performance at the New Theatre; it was brought into my mind just then. I meant to have mentioned it before.”

She looked up with only a slight show of interest. Those days at the theatre seemed to her now to be very far behind. There was nothing in connection with them which she cared to remember.

”It was the night of my first visit there,” he continued. ”There is a terrible scene at the end of the second act between Herdrine and her husband--you recollect it, of course. Just as you finished your denunciation, I distinctly heard a curious cry from the back of the house. It was a greater tribute to your acting than the applause, for it was genuine.”

”The piece was gloomy enough,” she remarked, ”to have dissolved the house in tears.”

”At least,” he said, ”it wrung the heart of one man. For I have not told you all. I was interested enough to climb up into the amphitheatre. The man sat there alone amongst a wilderness of empty seats. He was the picture of abject misery. I could scarcely see his face, but his att.i.tude was convincing. It was not a thing of chance either. I made some remark about him to an attendant, and he told me that night after night that man had occupied the same seat, always following every line of the play with the same mournful concentration, never speaking to any one, never moving from his seat from the beginning of the play to the end.”

”He must have been,” she declared, ”a person of singularly morbid taste. When I think of it now I s.h.i.+ver. I would not play Herdrine again for worlds.”

”I am very glad to hear you say so,” he said, smiling. ”Do you know that to me the most interesting feature of the play was its obvious effect upon this man. Its extreme pessimism is too much paraded, is laid on altogether with too thick a hand to ring true. The thing is an involved nightmare. One feels that as a work of art it is never convincing, yet underneath it all there must be something human, for it found its way into the heart of one man.”

”It is possible,” she remarked, ”that he was mad. The man who found it sufficiently amusing to come to the theatre night after night could scarcely have been in full possession of his senses.”

”That is possible,” he admitted; ”but I do not believe it. The man's face was sad enough, but it was not the face of a madman.”

”You did see his face, then?”

”On the last night of the play,” he continued. ”You remember you were going on to Lady Truton's, so I did not come behind. But I had a fancy to see you for a moment, and I came round into Pitt Street just as you were driving off. On the other side of the way this man was standing watching you!”

She looked at him with a suddenly kindled interest--or was it fear?--in her dark eyes. The colour had left her cheeks; she was white to the lips.

”Watching me?”

”Yes. As your carriage drove off he stood watching it. I don't know what prompted me, but I crossed the street to speak to him. He seemed such a lone, mournful figure standing there half dazed, shabby, muttering softly to himself. But when he saw me coming, he gave one half-frightened look at me and ran, literally ran down the street on to the Strand. I could not follow,--the police would have stopped him.

So he disappeared.”

”You saw his face. What was he like?”

Berenice had leaned right back amongst the yielding cus.h.i.+ons of her divan, and he could scarcely see her face. Yet her voice sounded to him strange and forced. He looked at her in some surprise.

”I had a glimpse of it. It was an ordinary face enough; in fact, it disappointed me a little. But the odd part of it was that it seemed vaguely familiar to me. I have seen it before, often. Yet, try as I will, I cannot recollect where, or under what circ.u.mstances.”

”At Oxford,” she suggested. ”By the bye, what was your college?”

”St. John's. No, I do not think,--I hope that it was not at Oxford.

Some day I shall think of it quite suddenly.”

Berenice rose from her chair with a sudden, tempestuous movement and stood before him.

”Listen!” she exclaimed. ”Supposing I were to tell you that I knew or could guess who that man was--why he came! Oh, if I were to tell you that I were a fraud, that----”