VI
Although fortified by the motto, Dorothy was still suffering from the memory of that afternoon, and when she arrived at the theater to dress and saw Tom Hewitt standing by the stage-door she tried to pass him without acknowledging his salute.
"Mr. Richards will be in front to-night," he told her, portentously.
"Oh, we're always hearing that," said Dorothy. "I don't believe it."
"It's a fact. Warren told me so himself. And Mr. Keal's come down with him."
So this was why Tufton had advised her to look her best to-night; the visit could only mean that the great man wanted girls for the autumn production at the Vanity. Dorothy began to cheer up. Even if Lily's behavior had disgusted Lord Clarehaven irreparably, such behavior would not spoil her own chance of being engaged by John Richards, and at the Vanity there would be plenty of titled admirers. No doubt most of them would be younger sons or elder sons who had not yet succeeded, but ... "j'y serai," murmured Dorothy. "It's a good thing that I don't fall in love very easily. And it's lucky I didn't let myself cry," she added, congratulating her reflection in the dressing-room mirror.
Every girl was painting herself and powdering herself and pulling up her stockings and patting her hair and, regardless of the undergraduates she had met during the week, preparing to act as she had never acted before. Dorothy took neither more nor less trouble with her appearance than she took every night.
This time rumor was incarnate in fact, for the great Mr. Richards came and stood in the wings during a large portion of the play, and Dorothy, convinced that the one thing she ought not to do was to throw a single glance in his direction, devoted all her attention to the front of the house. There were lots of flowers; but nobody, neither principal nor chorus-girl, was handed such a magnificent basket of pink roses as herself, and nobody who had not suffered as she had suffered that afternoon in the depths could have been so gloriously thrilled on the heights as Dorothy was when the curtain fell at the close of the performance amid the shouts and cheers of youthful art-loving England, and she was stopped in the wings by Mr. Water Keal.
"Come here, dear," he said. "I want to introduce you to Mr. Richards."
The impresario was a large and melancholy man whose voice reverberated in the back of a cavernous throat with so high a palate that consonants were lost in its echoes and his speech seemed to consist entirely of vowels.
"Who sent you the prehy flowers, dear?" he asked, lugubriously.
"The Earl of Clarehaven," said Dorothy, with a brilliant smile.
"Ha—ha, vehy 'ice, vehy 'ice," he muttered, fondling the card attached. "Goo' gir'! Goo' gir'!"
The millionaire's yachting friends wore evening gowns for the latter part of the second act, and Dorothy in old rose, with her basket of flowers and exquisite neck and shoulders, was indeed looking her best.
"Goo' gir'!" Mr. Richards boomed once more; then as she passed from the royal presence he patted her shoulder in congratulation, dusted the powder from his fingers, lit an enormous cigar, and wandered away with Mr. Keal.
When Dorothy reached the dressing-room every girl was speculating on the depth of the impression she had made upon Mr. Richards, but not one of them could claim that the great man had patted her on the back or noticed her flowers. Presently the call-boy came with a message that Miss Lonsdale was to be at the theater to-morrow morning at eleven o'clock without fail, and it was obvious to the most jealous observer that Dorothy's chance had come. She was so much elated by her good fortune that she was reconciled to Lily, told everybody what a delightful lunch she had had with Lord Clarehaven and what a delightful picnic she had had with Lord Clarehaven and how she had met a cousin of hers, Arthur Lonsdale, who was the only son of Lord Cleveden.
"You know, he was governor of Central India," Dorothy reminded the dressing-room.
"India!" echoed Miss Onslow. "That sounds hot stuff, anyway."
Dorothy buried her face in the roses to get rid of the effluvium of such vulgarity. And then in the middle of her success, just when her true friends should have been most pleased, Sylvia, who had shared—well, not shared, but had been allowed to assist at her triumph—Sylvia it was who asked, in a voice audible to the whole dressing-room:
"On which side of the road are you related to young Lonsdale?"
Luckily the joke was too obscure to be generally understood; but Dorothy decided to banish Sylvia from the list of her friends that in Lily's company she might henceforth inhabit an outer darkness unlit by Debrett's scarlet and gold.
"I expect I shall soon forget what an awful life touring is," said Dorothy to herself that night, as she turned back the limp cotton sheets and looked distastefully at the hummocky mattress. There was a trenchant symbolism, too, in massacring a flea with Debrett; no other volume would have been heavy enough.
The next morning Mr. Richards seemed to be inviting her—so gentle were his accents, so soft his intonation—to join the Vanity company next September at three pounds a week. Mr. Keal and his Jewish assistant, Mr. Fitzmaurice, were present at her triumph; and when Dorothy was going down-stairs from the manager's office, Mr. Fitzmaurice hurried after her and begged her not to forget that it was he who had been the first to recognize her talents.
"Well, call me a cab, there's a good boy," said Dorothy, to reward him; and Mr. Fitzmaurice, who only six months ago had looked at her so critically on that wet December morning in Leicester Square, now ran hither and thither in the summer weather until he had found her a cab.
"What swank!" Dorothy heard Clarice Beauchamp say when, with a rattle and a dash, she drove up to the station, where the company were mustering for their last journey together. But she had only a gracious smile for poor Clarice; and at Paddington, although she parted with Sylvia and Lily cordially enough, she did not invite either of them to come and see her in Lonsdale Road.