The long blinds of the windows had been let down and shut out the sceptical sunshine; and the candle footlights, flickering unprofessionally, mellowed the paintwork and patterned the home-made scenery with re-echoing lights, pools of unaccountable shadow, and shaftlike, wavering, prismatic gleams, flinging over the crude stage-setting a veil of fantastic charm.
The play opened, however, dully enough. The scenes chosen had had inevitably to be compressed, run together, mangled, and Clare had not found it easy work. Faulconbridge, bowdlerised out of all existence, could not tickle his hearers, and King John, not yet broken in to crown and mantle, gave him feeble support. But with the entrance of Constance, Arthur and the French court, actors and audience alike bestirred themselves.
Agatha, her dark eyes flashing, her lank figure softened and rounded by the generous sweep of her geranium-coloured robes, looked an authentic stage queen. Her exuberant movements and theatrical intonation had been skilfully utilised by Clare, who, playing on her eager vanity, had alternately checked and goaded her into a plausible rendering of the part. She was the reverse of nervous; her voice rolled her opening speech without a tremor; her impatient, impetuous delivery (she hardly let her fellow-actors finish their lines) fitted the character and was effective enough.
Yet to Clare, note-book in hand, prepared to pounce, cat-like, on deficiencies, neither she nor her foil dominated the stage, nor the row of schoolgirl princes. Her critical appreciation was for the little figure, wavering uncertainly between the shrieking queens, with scared anxious eyes, that swept the listening circle in faint appeal, quivering like a sensitive plant at each verbal assault, shrinking beneath the hail of blandishments and reproaches. The one speech of the scene, the reproof of Constance, was spoken with un-childlike, weary dignity—
"Good my mother, peace!
I would that I were low laid in my grave;
I am not worth this coil that's made for me."
Yet it was not Arthur that spoke, nor Louise—no frightened boy or overwrought, precocious girl. It was the voice of childhood itself, sexless, aloof; childhood the eternal pilgrim, wandering passive and perplexed, an elf among the giants: childhood, jostled by the uncaring crowd, swayed by gross energies and seared by alien passions.
"She's got it," muttered Clare to Alwynne, reporting progress in the interval; "oh, how she's got it!" She laughed shortly. "So that's her reading. Impudent monkey! But she's got her atmosphere. Uncanny, isn't it? It reminds me—do you remember that performance of hers last autumn with Childe Roland? I told you about it. Well, this brings it back, rather. Clever imp. I wonder how much of my coaching in this act she'll condescend to leave in?"
"You gave her a free hand, you know," deprecated Alwynne.
"I did. But it's impudence——"
"Inspiration——"