At six o'clock a meal, which called itself supper, was ready; and having bolted a cold edition of dinner, eked out with tinned peaches and cups of tea, actors and actresses marched forth in a body to begin the evening's work.
The curtain did not rise until half past seven, but this was Saturday night, and the town was eager for its entertainment. The young girls and their escorts liked nothing better than to see the "show men and women" walk past them up the hall, on the way to that thrilling region known as "behind the scenes," therefore at least a score of persons were seated in the dismal auditorium, munching apples or candy, and cracking peanuts, when the Human Flower and her company filed in.
A few little boys on the cheap benches at the back whistled, clapped their hands, stamped on the floor, and made "cat calls" as a greeting to the players, but those saluted took no notice, and skurried by like hunted things. Miss St. Clare hastened to her seat at the piano, near which an elderly quadroon had already begun to tune a fiddle, and melancholy Mr. Winter remained at the door to help the ticket seller, until it should be time for him to "make up" as the heroine's millionaire parent.
The gentlemen of the company (Loveland had already learned that they never spoke of each other as mere "men") dressed behind one partition, the ladies behind another, and the crowding could scarcely have been worse in the Black Hole of Calcutta. Nevertheless, everyone was more or less good natured. Costumes of a sort, and odds and ends of grease paints were offered to Loveland who, to his own surprise, was shaking and perspiring oddly with stage fright.
"What rot!" he roughly scolded himself. "As if an audience in a tenth-rate country village mattered! What do I care whether or not I know my part, or what they think of me?"
But the queer fact remained that he did care, and his heart thumped faster than it had thumped when he was roused one dark night to fight his first battle. As he saw what personable looking men his companions became after manipulating a few bits of grease-paint, putting on wigs and carefully-kept stage costumes, he began in spite of himself to take this queer theatrical engagement of his more seriously. He wanted to act well; he wanted to please Lillie de Lisle, and to satisfy Ed Binney, who was wishing him luck; he wanted to make a good impression on the pretty bright-eyed country girls who had stared at him with interest as he passed through the auditorium.
There were not nearly enough local stage hands employed in the theatre, and acting was not the only work the actors had to do. They helped place the scenery, and change the settings; they flew about like distracted demons, half dressed, with suspenders flying, turning a burglar's den into a millionaire's drawing-room; and between the bewildering alterations of scene, there was no rest for the sole of anyone's foot.
How they ever got themselves out of one costume into another in time, how they ever remembered which of their many doublings came first, which last, Loveland could not conceive; but, standing in the wings waiting for his own dreaded turn, he was filled with an increasing respect for the barn-stormers, male and female. They could act, too, most of them, which seemed to him the strangest part of all, for he had not expected to find the satellites of Bill's little Star twinkling with the light of talent. As for his own performance, he realised before it had begun that such histrionic efforts as had won him applause when an amateur in London would not be good enough to gain him admiration as a professional in Modunk. It was another thing when, as a handsome young soldier, Lord Loveland had swaggered easily about the stage, pleased with himself and pleasing everyone else, because everyone had come with the intention of being pleased.
Here, in remote little Modunk, the audience was evidently far more critical, and if it didn't like what it saw, it said so audibly with a voice from the cheap seats, or at least indulged in a prolonged fit of bored coughing. If Loveland could have gone on "as himself," as Jacobus had said, he might have captured the fancy of the girls; but as old Dave Dreadnought in a wild wig, and moth-eaten beard lent by "Pa" Winter, the new addition to the company could conquer the audience only by sheer force of acting.
Fortunately for Loveland, he was not obliged to walk onto the stage in answer to a cue, or it seemed to him that he could not have moved. It was bad enough to be "discovered," in the act of being murdered; and as the moment came when he would have to make his first speech, his blood was beating like a drum in his temples. His throat felt dry, and when his cue to speak was given by Jacobus with meaning emphasis, he could only swallow, and glare. Not a word of the carefully rehearsed part could he remember, and involuntarily looking out in front (a thing Ed Binney had warned him not to do) it seemed as if the rows of faces down below the yellow footlights were leaping up at him like a wave.