CHAPTER XXX
THERE IS NO NEWS OF GAVIN ORD
London, which loves a duchess or even personages of slightly less degree, when it discovers them in the arena where all the world may stretch out a finger to touch the noble pedestals, this London liked the story of the Lady Evelyn and flocked to the Carlton Theatre to see her and to criticise. The great Charles Izard, who measured all human greatness by the box-office, did not hesitate to declare that business to the extent of nineteen hundred pounds a week spoke more eloquently than any critic ... and he would add triumphantly, "Why, I discovered her, and she makes the rest of them look like thirty cents." By this time he implied a general inferiority of other actresses who were not filling their theatres to the extent of nineteen hundred pounds a week; and, regardless of the plain fact that mere curiosity had become his best friend, he continued to declare that he was the greatest and the wisest of men and that Etta Romney would have been a dismal failure under other management.
Evelyn certainly was a great success. No dinner party failed to discuss her charm or to admit it. You heard of her every day in theatrical clubs; a common question when people met was, "Have you seen Etta Romney?" Returning to their first judgments, the critics recanted nothing, though more than one really discerning writer perceived a change in her. The splendid Watley, with some nice asides upon Sophocles, Plautus, Judic, and Voltaire, admitted a difference:
"This is not the Di Vernon of the Spring," he wrote; "here is a newer conception, something of Rejane, a voice of sincerity matured; introspective comedy and the drama of pathos...."
The "Daily Shuffler," in plainer terms, said:
"Miss Romney does not let herself go—she appears to take poor Di's troubles too greatly to heart. We confess to certain watery tributes to her touching earnestness scintillating upon our manly cornea ... but we would remind this charming young actress that we go to the theatre to laugh as well as to cry ... and she has forgotten that. Perhaps the November fogs have something to do with it. She came to us in the Spring ... and with the Spring her lightness of heart may be given back to her. One of her audience, at least, hopes that it will be so...."
No one was more conscious of this change than Evelyn herself. That wild, almost uncontrollable passion of art, had left her. She liked to think that she had conquered it, and became a new Etta, for the sake of a man who loved her and had saved her from herself. Here she was, lauded to the skies by critical London; asked to every house, fawned upon, coveted, proclaimed a success beyond knowledge; and yet as far from knowing the secrets of such success as ever she had been in all her life. Anxiety for Gavin's safety attended every hour of her busy day. Confident at first that his dogged perseverance, his stubborn resolution, and his manifest prudence would be weapons enough for the work he had to do in Roumania, she had paid but little heed to his silence; for that she understood to be a wild country and one which would not expedite his letters. When he ceased to write, she said that he would have gone to the mountains. A longer spell of silence and the first whisper of her alarms began to make itself heard. How if he could not write to her because of accident or illness or even conspiracy? Terrified by the phantoms of imagination which now crowded upon her, she compelled her father to warn the Ministry at Bukharest, the Foreign Office, the Consulate. The letters were answered by promises as meaningless as they were futile. Gavin's few relatives in England bestirred themselves with little result—while Bukharest answered that the Englishmen had crossed the mountains into Servia and that nothing further of them was known.
So Evelyn had come to London to save the man she loved, if her new independence and her love might save him. She cared no longer that her father should know of this determination; for she doubted both his will to help her and the honesty of the declaration that he would do so. In truth, Robert Forrester had been unable to give battle to those forces which the years and his own youth had raged against him. To one who had loved the wild life of an adventurer, who had sown tares in many lands, the harvest time of age could support no pretentious dignity nor long maintain those greater ambitions which had momentarily attended his succession to the earldom.
He sank beneath the mental burdens; became an old man when he should still have been in his prime; could utter but a senile assent to every rogue who tricked him. Deep down in his heart lay hunger for the old life. An evil cynicism laughed at the restraints which place and power put upon him.
"Better a night on the hills with Zallony," he could tell himself, "than a life's dominion in the realms of social fatuity." It would have been so easy for him had Evelyn married Georges Odin's son. What it might have meant to her he had hardly considered.
And yet possibly his love for Evelyn was the truest emotion of his life. When her letter reached him and he could bring himself to understand it, the blow fell with a stunning force which seemed to shatter every remaining idol of his life. His beloved daughter! The mistress of his house! Capering about upon a stage for the guineas of a man he, Robert Forrester, could have bought up twenty times over. Here was a debacle beyond any he had imagined. The humiliation of it, the cruelty of it—more than that, the malice of her destiny! Was she not Dora d'Istran's daughter, and had not this blood of rebellion run in her veins since her childhood? What else could he have looked for, he asked himself ... and in the same breath he set the logic of it aside and sat down to write to her.
It was a pitiful letter, full of the tenderest expressions and the bitterest reproach.
"Do you owe nothing to my name?" he asked her, and in the same sentence could protest his love for her. "I am an old man and am alone and must look to the newspapers for news of the daughter who is all to me. Is this fame so much above a father's affection, then; so dear a thing that his home must be a home no longer because of it? The people say you are a great actress; some day you will ask yourself, Evelyn, if it was worth being that to wound one who has had no greater desire than the happiness of his only child...."
Just in such a strain had he delivered himself at home, and, now as then, the words earned but a cold response. "There is some secret of my father's life which is hidden from me," Evelyn said. What it could be, why it should affect her, she knew not. When he spoke of his failing health, the letter found her more sympathetic. She would have gone to him at any cost had she understood that he was really ill; but the general terms he used seemed to imply no immediate necessity ... and was there not Gavin to be considered?
Indeed, this priceless gift of love now influenced every act and deed of her life. She counted the hours which should bring her news of Gavin, worshipped her own image of him upon the stage at night; wrestled unceasingly with the voices which would speak of the Etta Romney that had been; the child of passionate dreamings and of an Eastern heritage no longer.
And her prayer was this, for Gavin's safety and her own salvation in his love.