“There are only four chairs,” he said in a rasping voice. “I wish another chair to be brought for my friend, Jeremy Tuft.” In a moment, after some confusion, Jeremy found himself sitting next to the Lady Eva and hearing her demure reply to his greeting, which was almost drowned by the noise of the guests behind them entering the hall. When this had died down, he essayed a second remark, but received no answer beyond an inclination of the beautiful head, which he was devoutly studying with a strained sidelong glance. He therefore examined the stage instead and saw that it was already set with roughly-painted canvas flats. These appeared to be intended to represent a wood. There was no curtain; and the end of what looked remarkably like a piano was projecting from one of the wings. Tall canvas screens ran from the two ends of the stage to the walls of the room, covering on each side a space about five feet long; and Jeremy surmised, from a persistent whispering and from an occasional bulging of the canvas, that the players were hidden in these narrow quarters.
Presently three loud raps were heard and a hush fell on the audience. Jeremy started in his seat when an invisible performer at the piano began to play what sounded like a mangled waltz, very loud, very crude and very vulgar. The strings of the piano were in indifferent condition, the skill of the executant was no better, and Jeremy, who was proud of having some sympathy for music, suffered a little. When he looked about him, however, he saw neither amusement nor annoyance on any face. Luckily the performance lasted only a few minutes. As soon as it was done, an actress tripped affectedly on to the stage from the right side and began to declaim in a voice so high-pitched and theatrical and with so many gestures and movements of her head that Jeremy could hardly understand a word of what she was saying. He gathered that she had come to this wood to meet her lover; and his guess was confirmed when an actor strode on from the left, stamping his feet on the resounding boards as he came. Then both began to declaim at one another in voices of enormous power. Their stilted violence alarmed and repelled Jeremy. He ceased to look at the stage, wondering whether, under cover of the excitement which this scene must be causing, he dared steal a glance at the Lady Eva. He did so, and discovered that she was looking at him.
Both averted their eyes, and Jeremy sat staring at the floor, his heart beating and, he felt certain, his cheeks burning. Above his head the drama ranted along with a loud monotonous noise like the sea beating on rocks, and made a background to his thoughts. That single glance had precipitated his emotions, and he must now confess to himself, what had been before a mere toy for the brain, that he loved this girl. The admission carried his mind whirling wildly away, and he would have been content to brood on it with a secret rising delight until he was interrupted. But he could not help asking himself whether he had not discovered something else, whether there had not been at least a particular interest in the eyes of the Lady Eva. This second thought at first terrified him by its revelation of his own audacity in conceiving it. For a moment it stopped him still, and then suddenly there was silence on the stage.
The actor and the actress were departing, she to the right, he to the left, bowing as they went. The whole audience began clapping in a decorous and gentle manner. The Lady Eva leant slightly towards Jeremy as he sat stupefied and motionless, and whispered:
“You must clap. You will be thought impolite if you do not.”
He obeyed in a dazed way, watching her and seeing how she brought the palms of her hands together, regularly but so softly that it made hardly any sound. While the applause still continued, servants came forward from the sides of the hall, sprang up on the stage and began removing the scenery, which they replaced with other flats, representing a street. And after an interval, and another performance on the vile piano, the play resumed its course.
Jeremy must have followed it with some part of his mind of the existence of which he was ignorant: for when it was all over he had a reasonably clear notion of what it had been about. There had been two lovers and a villain and a buffoon who fell over his own feet. There had been one affecting moment when the heroine, deserted and hopeless, had been deluged with small pieces of paper, not too skilfully sprinkled on her, while she walked up and down, striving to comfort her child and lamenting the perfidy of man. And the play itself, as well as the acting, had been of an incredible theatricality and exaggeration. If Jeremy’s conscious mind had been active while the performance was going on he could not but have followed every point with amazement and indulged in some interesting reflections on the dramatic tastes of his new contemporaries. As it was, when it was over and he was able to look back on it, he could only wonder whether his unaccountable recollection of it was to be believed.
For after the end of the first scene, after the Lady Eva had spoken to him, he was plunged even more deeply into that delicious but alarming turmoil of feeling. His mind unbidden suggested to him sobering considerations only for the pleasure, as it appeared, of seeing them flung on one side. There was no certainty, no probability even, that the girl had loved him. In his story there was enough reason why she should look at him with interest, and he had learnt that her usual manner was frank and unstudied, not therefore to be too easily construed. Yet a mad certainty rose in his heart and overwhelmed this sensible thought. Jeremy closed his eyes resolutely to the buffoon on the stage, who was now imitating a drunken man and abandoned himself to visions of the girl at his side.
At that moment he would perhaps have been unwilling to be awakened to speak to her, even to embrace her. That would come, must come; but this exquisite dreaming, hitherto unknown to him, filled the circle of his forces, satisfied all his desires. He pictured her as he had seen her half-a-dozen times, walking across a room, lifting her eyes to his with some question in them, once riding, once with a piece of needlework in her hands, of which, without liking it, she was making a sound and creditable job. He thought of her clear, wide eyes, her free, athletic carriage, her pleasant voice. For a little while he was in neither the strange nor the familiar world of his twofold experience: his new hope had dissolved both recent and ancient memories alike. Then suddenly across the texture of his passionate meditation came a thought of himself. He shifted uneasily and felt cold. Who and what was he? He told himself—a sport of nature, a young man unnaturally old, an old man unnaturally young. Could he be certain yet what trick it was that Trehanoc’s ray had played on him? Might he not, one day, to-morrow or a year hence, perhaps in her very arms, suddenly expire, even crumble into dust? He shuddered in the chilling air of these suggestions and was filled with misery. But the next moment he could see himself confessing his misery to the Lady Eva and receiving her comfort.
He woke. Mixed with the light clapping, in which from time to time he had mechanically joined, there was a stir and shuffle as though the audience was preparing to depart; and, looking up, he saw the whole cast on the stage, bowing with a certain air of finality, the hero and the villain holding each a hand of the heroine. The Speaker was rising from his seat, and at that sign all the other persons in the room rose, too, and waited. Jeremy, brought down out of dreams, searched in his mind for something to say to the Lady Eva and dared not look at her until he had found it. But when he turned to her he saw that she was staring in another direction. A servant had just reached the Speaker and had apparently given him a letter. The whole assembly stood hushed and immobile while he read it, and Jeremy, his breath caught by an inexplicable sense of crisis, saw that, half-way through, the old man’s hand jerked suddenly and was steady again.