CHAPTER VII.
A RARE DIAMOND.
When Doris came down from her room the next morning, it did not seem as if the tremendous excitement of the preceding night had left any baleful effects. In her soft-white dress, she still looked more like a schoolgirl home for the holidays than the tragedienne who had, a few hours ago, moved a vast audience to tears and wild enthusiasm.
She came into the room singing, just as the birds sang under the eaves by her window, and laughed lightly as she saw Jeffrey bending earnestly over a copy of the local daily paper.
“Well, have I got a tremendous slating, Jeffrey?” she said, almost carelessly.
“Slating!” he replied. “If anything, it is too laudatory; read it!” and he held it out to her.
“After breakfast; I am so hungry,” she said, contentedly. “Read it to me, Jeffrey; all the nicest paragraphs,” and she laughed again.
He glanced at Doris under his heavy brows.
“At any rate, your success has not made you vain, Doris,” he said with grim approval.
“If it should make any one vain, it should you—not me, dear,” she said, quietly. “It was you made last night’s Juliet, good or bad.”
“Very well,” he said; “I’ll be vain for both of us. Yes, it is a wonderfully goodcritique, and I think the news of your success will reach London, too. There were a couple of critics from London in the stalls; I didn’t tell you last night, in case it should make you nervous.”
She looked at him thoughtfully.
“I don’t think it would have made much difference,” she said. “I seemed to forget everybody and everything——”
“After the second act,” he put in.
She blushed to her temples.
“There was a distinct change, then; I noticed it, and I have been puzzling my brain to account for it. Perhaps you can explain it.”
She shook her head, and kept her eyes on her plate.
“No? Strange. But such inspirations are not uncommon with genius; and yours is genius, Doris.”
“Don’t frighten me, Jeffrey,” she said, with a faint smile.
“I have agreed with Brown, the manager,” he went on, “that you should play Juliet for a week, and after that some other of the big characters for a month, and he is to pay you ten pounds a week.”
Doris looked up, surprised. Ten pounds per week is a large sum for merely provincial actresses.
He smiled grimly.
“You think it a great deal? In a day or two you will get offers from London of twenty, thirty, forty pounds. But I am in no hurry. I have not been in a hurry all through. I want you to feel your feet, to feel secure in all the big parts here in the provinces before you appear in London. Then your success will be assured whatever you may undertake.”
“You think of everything, Jeffrey,” she said, gratefully.
“I have nothing else to think of, nothing else to tell you!” he responded, quietly, almost pathetically. “I have set my heart upon you being a great actress and”—hepaused—“I think it would break, if you failed. But there is no need to speak of failure after last night.”
He got up as he spoke and folded the newspaper.
“I’m going down to the theatre,” he said; he was never quite contented away from it. “You’d better look over your part this morning. Take it into the open air as you did the other day; it seems to succeed.”
“Very well,” she said, obediently.
He put on his hat and the thick inverness he wore in all weathers, and went away, and Doris sat looking dreamily before her.
Then, suddenly, she got up. She would take his advice and go into the meadows—for the meadows meant the open air to her—and as she was going she would take Cecil Neville’s handkerchief and place it on the bank as he had requested.
She put on her hat and jacket, and, possibly for the convenience of carrying, thrust the handkerchief in the bosom of her dress, where it lay hidden all the preceding day, and started.
It was a glorious morning, with only a feather of cloud here and there in the sky, and the birds sang as if winter were an unknown season in England.
With her stage copy of “Romeo and Juliet” under her arm, Doris Marlowe, the simple child of nature, the famous actress, made her way to the meadows.
The Barton folks have something else to do than wander in their meadows, and Doris did not meet a soul; the great elms, which threw their shadows over the brook, were as solitary as if they had been planted in Eden. But lonely as the spot was, Doris peopled it with memories; and she stood by the brook and recalled the vision of the powerful figure on the great horse, as it appeared before her the moment prior to its being hurled at her feet.
“How strange that he should have been at the theatre last night!” she thought. “How curious it must have seemed to him, seeing me there as Juliet! I wonder whether he was sorry or glad!”
She could not answer the question to her satisfaction, but she stood motionless for a moment or two, recalling the words he had spoken as he stood beside the fly last night.
Then she took the handkerchief from her bosom, and, folding it with careful neatness, placed it on the bank where she had sat.
“It is not likely that any one will come here before he comes to fetch it this afternoon,” she said.
Almost before the words were out of her lips a stalwart form leaped the hedge, and stood before her.
Doris started and her face flushed; then, pale and composed, she lifted her eyes to his.
“Well, now!” he said, in humble apology, “I seem fated to startle you, Miss Marlowe. I had no idea you were here——” he stopped, awed to silence by her silence.
“You said you would come for it in the afternoon,” she remarked, almost coldly.
He colored.
“Yes, I know; but I could not come this afternoon, and I thought——” he stopped, and raised his frank eyes to her face, pleadingly.
“You thought?” she said very gravely, her brows drawn together slightly.
“Well,” he said, as if with an effort, “I will tell the truth! I thought that if I came this morning I might meet you. It was just a chance. Are you angry?”
She was silent a moment. Was she angry? She felt that she ought to be; and had a suspicion that he had, so to speak, entrapped her into a meeting with him; and she honestly tried to be angry.
“It does not matter,” she said, at last, very coldly. “There is your handkerchief.”
He picked it up, and thrust it in his pocket.
“Oh, thank you, thank you!” he said, gratefully. She turned to go, with a slight inclination of her head, but he went on, speaking hurriedly and so earnestly, that she paused, her head half turned over her shoulder, her eyes cast down; an attitude so full of grace that it almost drove what he was going to say out of his head. “I don’t deserve that you should have brought it.”
“I don’t think you do,” she assented, a faint smile curving her lips at his ingenuousness.
“I daresay you think it strange that I didn’t ask you to send it to the Towers?” he went on. “You know youwould not let me call at your place for it,” he added, apologetically.
“Why did you not let me send it?” she asked, with faint curiosity.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. “Won’t you sit down and rest? It’s warm this morning, and you have walked far, perhaps.”
She hesitated a moment, then sat down, almost on the spot she had sat the preceding day, and Cecil Neville could not help a wild wish rushing to his heart that he was once again lying at her feet!
He sat down on the bank, as near to her as he dared, and leaned on his elbow toward her.
“You see, I’m only a visitor at the Towers. The marquis—that’s my uncle, you know——”
“I don’t know,” she said, with a faint smile, her eyes fixed dreamily on her book.
“Of course not,” he assented. “Well, we don’t get on together. He is—not to put too fine a point on it—about as disagreeable a person as you’d find in two days’ walk! We never have got on together. They say that a man always hates the fellow who is to come after him, unless it happens to be his own son; and I suppose that’s the reason the marquis hates me——”
“Because you are to be the next marquis?” she said.
He nodded coolly, and tilted his hat so that it screened his eyes from the sun, and permitted him to feast upon her beautiful face more completely.
“Yes, that is about it; but I’ll give the marquis the credit of hating everybody all round, himself into the bargain, I dare say; but I fancy he reserves a special line of detestation for his own relatives. Ah, you are smiling,” he broke off, with the short laugh that sounded so good and frank. “You are wondering what this has to do with my disliking you to send the handkerchief!”
Doris smiled again in assent.
“Well, you see, I thought it might come into the marquis’s possession, or that he’d hear of it through Lady Grace——”
She turned her eyes upon his, not curiously, but with graceful questioning.
“That’s a lady—Lord Peyton’s daughter—who is stoppingthere,” he explained, “and they might ask questions, and—and bother me about it!”
“Well?” she said, quietly.
He looked down half hesitatingly, then met her eyes, which seemed in their fixed regard to reach to his soul.
“Well—I’ve said that I’ll tell you the whole truth, and I will; and the fact is I didn’t want to be asked questions about the—the accident yesterday. I—yes, I’ll speak out, though I should offend you—I wanted to keep it to myself!”
“To keep it to yourself?” she repeated.
A flush came to his tanned face, and his eyes were raised for a moment.
“Yes. When a man gets a good thing—Suppose—” he broke off—“a fellow found a big nugget, or a rare diamond, or anything of that sort, he would like to keep it to himself, you know!”
She smiled again.
“Do you want me to take that as a compliment?” she said. “Am I the big nugget, the rare diamond which you discovered?”
He flushed more deeply, and looked at her pleadingly.
“I’m such an idiot that I can’t express myself,” he said, apologetically. “I meant that the whole thing, your—your kindness and goodness to me was so precious that I didn’t want a lot of people talking about it. I wanted to keep it to myself, as something especially belonging to me, something too precious to discuss with others. I’m afraid I can’t make you understand.”
“You do yourself an injustice,” she said. “You express yourself very well!”
“Now, you are laughing at me,” he said.
“As you would laugh at me, Lord Neville, if I believed what you said!” she retorted, not sharply, but with a sweet gravity that was indescribable.
“I said I would tell you the truth, and I’ve told nothing but the truth,” he said, earnestly. “I dare say it seems strange to you that I should have this feeling about our meeting yesterday. I dare say you forgot all about it half-an-hour afterward! Why should you remember it, you who have so much to think of?”
Doris turned her face away, lest her eyes should betrayher, and tell him how much, how constantly she had thought of him!
“You,” he went on, “who are so clever and gifted, a great actress, with no end of people round you——”
She looked at him with a pensive smile.
“But you are wrong, quite wrong,” she said. “I am not a great actress. Last night was my first success, if success it was——”
“There is no ‘if’ about it!” he said, with fervent enthusiasm. “It was a tremendous success! Why, I heard people declare that there had been nothing like it since Kate Terry’s Juliet! And I—though I’m not of much account—I was never so much carried out of myself. Why, to tell you how great and grand you were, I actually forgot that you were the young lady who was so good to me yesterday, and only thought of you as Shakespeare’s Juliet; and I felt quite ashamed that I had ever given so much trouble to so great a personage.”
His warm, ardent praise touched her, and her lips quivered.
“Juliet was only a simple girl, after all,” she said. “If she had chanced to have been placed in my position yesterday she would have done the same.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “I’m not clever, like you,” and he pushed his hat off his brows with a deprecatory gesture. “But I know you must have something else to think of than the fellow who was such an idiot as to jump a hedge before he saw what was on the other side; and, of course, you must have no end of—of people round you!”
“But I have not! You are quite wrong,” she said, with her sweet, thoughtful smile. “I live with an old friend, who has been like a father to me! I haven’t any father or mother, and I see no one, except at the theatre, and then only in the way of business,” and she laughed.
He listened as if every word she dropped from her sweetly-curved lips were a pearl.
“How strange it sounds! You so clever and beau——so great an actress.”
“Yes,” she said dreamily; “I suppose it does sound strange! Everybody thinks that an actress must be the gayest of the gay; surrounded by light-hearted peopleturning night into day, and living on champagne and roast chicken.” She smiled. “Jeffrey and I know scarcely any one, and I do not think I have tasted champagne, excepting once, when one of the managers had a benefit; and we go straight to bed directly we get home from the theatre; and, oh, it is quite different to what people imagine.”
He drew forward a little, so that the hand upon which he leaned touched the edge of her cotton dress.
“And—and you didn’t quite forget our strange meeting?”
“I am not in the habit of seeing gentlemen flung from their horses at my feet, Lord Neville,” she said, but she turned her face from him.
“And I,” he said. “Why, I have not been able to get it out of my head! I thought of you every minute; and I tried not to, because——”
“Because?” she said. “Pray go on!” and she smiled.
“Well,” he said, modestly, “because it seemed like presumption. And then I went to the theatre, and——” he stopped. “For a moment or two I couldn’t believe that it was really you on the stage there. And when the people in the theatre began to shout out your name, it woke me from a kind of dream.”
She smiled in silence; then she made a movement threatening her departure.
“Ah, wait a little while!” he pleaded. “It is delightful here in the sunshine. Don’t go for a minute or two. I wish——” he stopped.
“What is it you wish?” she asked, regarding him with smiling eyes that drooped under his ardent ones.
“Well,” he said, “I wish that you would let me go home with you and see Mr. Jeffrey——”
“Jeffrey Flint,” she said. She shook her head. “He sees no one, makes no acquaintances. He—he is very reserved.”
Speaking of him reminded her of the fact that he would strongly disapprove of her interview with this strange young gentleman. She rose.
“I must go now,” she said. “I have not asked whether you were hurt by your fall, Lord Neville, but I hope you were not.”
“Must you go?” he said, ignoring the rest of her sentence as of no account. “We seem to have been talking only a few minutes! And there was such a lot that I wanted to say! I wanted to tell you all that I thought when I saw you last night; but I couldn’t if I had the chance, because I am a perfect idiot when it comes to expressing myself. But I do think it was wonderful! Are you going to play to-night? But of course you are.”
“Yes,” she said, absently, “I play to-night. I play every night!”
“I shall be there,” he said, as if it were a matter of course.
She looked at him thoughtfully.
“Of course I shall!” he said. “Why, last night I seemed to have a kind of interest in it which the other people in the theatre hadn’t. Yes. As if—as if—I knew you intimately, you know. Of course, I shall be there! And I shall bring a big bouquet. What flowers do you like best?”
She almost started, as if she had not been listening to him; as a matter of fact, she had been listening to the deep, measured voice rather than the words.
“Flowers?—oh—violets,” she said, unthinkingly.
“Why!” he exclaimed. “That is what I threw you last night! Of course, you didn’t know. You can’t see beyond the footlights, can you? I’ve heard you can’t. Violets! I’ll get some. I shall take a seat in the stall to-night. I shall see and hear you better there.”
“I should have thought you had seen and heard me enough already,” she said with a smile.
“No, but I haven’t!” he responded, eagerly. “I couldn’t see you or hear you too much if I looked at you and listened to you all day!”
Her face grew crimson, but she turned her head toward him with a smile on her face.
“For flattery, pure and simple, I don’t think you could surpass that, Lord Neville.”
“Flattery!” he exclaimed, as if hurt. “It is no flattery, it is the honest truth. And, Miss Marlowe, I do not ask you to believe—” he saw her start and lift her head as if listening, and looking up to ascertain the cause, sawthat her eyes were fixed upon some spot behind him, and he heard the sound of footsteps.
“I must go,” she said, as if suddenly awakened to a sense of the situation.
“Ah, no,” he breathed; then he leaned toward her with half-timid eagerness. “Will you come to-morrow?”
The footsteps came nearer.
“I promise—nothing,” said Doris, her brows coming together, and with a half glance at his earnest face she glided away from him.
Lord Neville rose and looked after her with the expression which encompassed the desire to follow her; but in that moment a hand fell lightly upon his shoulder, and a voice exclaimed:
“What, Cissy!”
Lord Neville swung round.
“Hallo, Spenser!” he said. “Why, what on earth brought you here?”