"There's my hand on it," said Mr. Beverley with solemnity. There in Charing Cross Road they shook hands on the bargain. "Don't forget! Good-night, Lisle. Don't forget!" He darted away across the road and vanished into the bowels of the earth.
Arthur Lisle strolled on to his lodgings, humming a tune. Good sort, weren't they, all of them? Suddenly he yawned, and became aware of feeling very tired. Been an evening, hadn't it?
Half-an-hour later he tumbled into bed, with a happy smile still on his lips. He could not get the picture of that girl waving the telegram at him out of his head.
[CHAPTER XXIX]
TEARS AND A SMILE
IN the end the Syndicate left to Joe Halliday the responsibility of deciding on the future of the unfortunate farce, so far as it had a future on which to decide. On mature reflection Joe was for acting on the sound business principle of 'cutting a loss,' and the turn of events reinforced his opinion. They had taken the Burlington for four weeks certain, and the liability for rent was a serious fact and a heavy item to reckon with. Another dramatic venture wanted a home, and Joe had the opportunity of sub-letting the theatre for the last two weeks of the term. By and with the advice of Mr. Etheringham he closed with the offer. Did You Say Mrs? dragged on for its fortnight, never showing vitality enough to inspire any hope of its recovering from the rude blow of the first night. In the day-time new figures filled the stage of the Burlington, new hopes and fears centred there. Only Mr. Etheringham remained, producing the new venture with the same fiery and inexhaustible energy, lifting dead weights with his hands, toiling, moiling, in perpetual strife. Gone soon were all the others who had become so familiar, from the great Mr. Spring, the Indefatigable, downwards, some to other engagements, some left "out"—débris from the wreck of the unhappy Did You Say Mrs?
Gone too, soon, was Miss Ayesha Layard with her infectious laugh. For her sake Arthur had sat through the farce once again—not even for her sake twice, so inconceivably flat had it now become to him. He had gone round and seen her, but she had other guests and no real conversation was possible. Then he saw in the papers that she was to go to America; a manager from that country had come to see the piece, and, though he did not take that, he did take Miss Layard, with whose talents he was much struck. He offered a handsome salary, and she jumped at it. Joe let her go three days before the end of the hopeless little run. One of the last items of the Syndicate's expenditure was a bouquet of flowers, presented to her at Euston on the morning of her departure. Arthur went to see her off, found her surrounded by folk strange to him, had just a hand-clasp, a hearty greeting, a merry flash from her eyes, and, as he walked off, the echo of her laugh for a moment in his ears. The changes and chances of theatrical life carried her out of his orbit as suddenly as she had come into it; she left behind her, as chief legacy, just that vivid memory which linked her so fantastically with Bernadette.
So the whole thing seemed to him to end—the Syndicate, the speculation, his voyage into the unknown seas of the theatre. It was all over, shattered by a blow almost as sudden, almost as tragical, as that which had smitten his adoration itself. Both of these things, always connected together for him by subtle bonds of thought and emotion, making together the chief preoccupation of the last six months of his life, now passed out of it, and could occupy his days no longer. They had come like visions—Bernadette in her barouche, the glittering thousands dangled in Fortune's hand—and seemed now to depart in like fashion, transitory and unsubstantial.
Yet to Arthur Lisle they stood as the two greatest things that had up to now happened in his life, the most significant and the most vivid. Set together—as they insisted on being set together from the beginning to the end, from the first impulse of ambition roused by Bernadette to the coming of her telegram on that momentous evening—they made his first great venture, his most notable experience. They had revealed and developed his nature, plumbed feeling and tested courage. He was different now from Marie Sarradet's placid, contented, half-condescending wooer, different from him who had worshipped Bernadette with virgin eyes—different now even from the forsaken and remorseful lover of that black hour at Hilsey. He had received an initiation—a beginning of wisdom, an opening of the eyes, a glimpse of what a man's life may be and hold and do for him. He had seen lights glimmering on the surface of other lives, and now and then, however dimly and fitfully, revealing their deeper waters.