Nevertheless, he read for an hour, till the streets below grew silent, and his own voice, unaccustomed to such exercise, lost something of its usual clearness. Then he laid the volume down, and there was silence between them.
“I have been thinking,” he said at last, “of a singular incident in connection with your performance at the New Theatre; it was brought into my mind just then. I meant to have mentioned it before.”
She looked up with only a slight show of interest. Those days at the theatre seemed to her now to be very far behind. There was nothing in connection with them which she cared to remember.
“It was the night of my first visit there,” he continued. “There is a terrible scene at the end of the second act between Herdrine and her husband—you recollect it, of course. Just as you finished your denunciation, I distinctly heard a curious cry from the back of the house. It was a greater tribute to your acting than the applause, for it was genuine.”
“The piece was gloomy enough,” she remarked, “to have dissolved the house in tears.”
“At least,” he said, “it wrung the heart of one man. For I have not told you all. I was interested enough to climb up into the amphitheatre. The man sat there alone amongst a wilderness of empty seats. He was the picture of abject misery. I could scarcely see his face, but his attitude was convincing. It was not a thing of chance either. I made some remark about him to an attendant, and he told me that night after night that man had occupied the same seat, always following every line of the play with the same mournful concentration, never speaking to any one, never moving from his seat from the beginning of the play to the end.”
“He must have been,” she declared, “a person of singularly morbid taste. When I think of it now I shiver. I would not play Herdrine again for worlds.”
“I am very glad to hear you say so,” he said, smiling. “Do you know that to me the most interesting feature of the play was its obvious effect upon this man. Its extreme pessimism is too much paraded, is laid on altogether with too thick a hand to ring true. The thing is an involved nightmare. One feels that as a work of art it is never convincing, yet underneath it all there must be something human, for it found its way into the heart of one man.”
“It is possible,” she remarked, “that he was mad. The man who found it sufficiently amusing to come to the theatre night after night could scarcely have been in full possession of his senses.”