* * * * * *
It was a fortnight since the duke had been allowed to listen to the reading of the play at the Park Lane Theatre.
When he had heard James Fabian Rose read the work to the company who sat and stood around upon the grey and empty stage the duke had not been very much impressed. He had not been impressed—that is to say—with the actual achievement of Rose's work. He had listened with some bewilderment to the tags, stage directions, and so forth, and now and then he had been caught up into a mental reverie by some biting, stinging paradox or epigram.
As he sat there the duke had been frankly watching Mary Marriott's face as she listened to the author's words. He saw her eyes light up and become intent, or flicker down into a strange gloom. He marked the sudden rigidity of her pose, the relaxation of it when something was afoot in which she was not particularly concerned, the whole careful attention and sympathetic watching of the girl. What all this play meant, he, sitting on a chair on the O.P. side of the stage, could hardly gather. He realised, nevertheless, by watching Mary, and by surveying the other members of the company, that the play was obviously something rather important and out of the usual run of such things.
To him it conveyed little or nothing, but he had become sufficiently mobile in mind to realise that probably this happening in the grey light of the afternoon and the shabby surroundings of the stage were yet instinct with potentiality, and would become—in their full fruition—something charged with purpose and an appeal to the general world.
After it was all over he had thanked Rose, Aubrey Flood, and Mary Marriott, had got into a cab and been driven back to Grosvenor Street. He was conscious himself at the moment that he had been a little unresponsive and chilly in his manner, but for the life of him he hadn't been able to express himself more pleasantly.
"Thank you so much, Miss Marriott," he had said, "for letting me come here this afternoon. Indeed, Mr. Rose, I think it is most sporting of you to ask me. For my part, I frankly confess I don't realise what it's all about! It's all so new to me, you know, to hear something read in this way, and I cannot grasp it as a whole. At the same time," he concluded with a weary smile, "at the same time, if this is your attack upon me, or, rather, upon people like me, then, my dear Mr. Rose, I think you ought to sharpen your sword."
As he had said this both Aubrey Flood and the great Socialist had chuckled, while the former remarked, "Wait and see, your Grace. Wait and see what we can eventually spin out of such dull ritual on such a grey afternoon as this."
"I will, Mr. Rose," the duke had answered rather shortly, and gone back to the cheery house in Grosvenor Street.
He had told Lord Hayle and Lady Constance all about his experience of the afternoon. Neither of them had been very interested, and Lady Constance remarked that all "excursions into les coulisses must surely be rather disappointing."