It seemed a pitiful, a monstrous thing. Hugh made no further protest, but that his queenly sister, after walking untouched through swarms of rich and talented suitors, should fall a victim to a poor and unknown architect, who was a failure at his own business as well as a playwright.
Mrs. MacDavitt, who stood quite in awe of her daughter, and who feared the sudden, hot temper of her son, passed through some trying hours as the days went by. Helen was plainly suffering, and the mother cautioned the son to speak gently. "I fear she prized him highly—the young Douglass," she said, "and, I confess, I had a kin' o' liking for the lad. He was so keen and resolved."
"He was keen to 'do' us, mother, and when he found he couldn't he pulled his freight. He could write, I'll admit that, but he wouldn't write what people wanted to hear. He was too badly stuck on his own 'genius.'"
Helen went to her task at the theatre without heart, though she pretended to a greater enthusiasm than ever. But each time she entered upon the second act of the play a mysterious and solacing pleasure came to her. She enjoyed the words with which Enid questions the life of her richest and most powerful suitor. The mingled shrewdness, simplicity, and sweetness of this scene always filled her with a new sense of Douglass's power of divination. Indeed, she closed the play each night with a sense of being more deeply indebted to him as well as a feeling of having been near him. Once she saw a face strangely like his in the upper gallery, and the blood tingled round her heart, and she played the remainder of the act with mind distraught. "Can it be possible that he is still in the city?" she asked herself.
XVIII
T was, indeed, the playwright. Each night he left his boarding-place, drawn by an impulse he could not resist, to walk slowly to and fro opposite the theatre entrance, calculating with agonized eye the meagre numbers of those who entered. At times he took his stand near the door in a shadowy nook (with coat-collar rolled high about his ears), in order to observe the passing stream, hoping, exulting, and suffering alternately as groups from the crowd paused for a moment to study the displayed photographs, only to pass on to other amusement with some careless allusion to the fallen star.
This hurt him worst of all—that these motes, these cheap little boys and girls, could now sneer at or pity Helen Merival. "I brought her to this," he repeated, with morbid sense of power. "When she met me she was queen of the city; now she is an object of pity."
This feeling of guilt, this egotism deepened each night as he watched the city's pleasure-seekers pace past the door. It was of no avail to say that the few who entered were of higher type than the many who passed. "The profession which Helen serves cannot live on the wishes of the few, the many must be pleased. To become exclusive in appeal is to die of hunger. This is why the sordid, commonplace playwrights and the business-like managers succeed while the idealists fail. There is an iron law of limitation here."