It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this—on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted—present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view.
The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something—he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come."
"To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick.
"Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards.
When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house—the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him—he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit.
On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration—words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card.
"That's no use—it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object—a bracelet, a glove, or a flower—to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling—only fly!"
His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick.
"I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?"
"Give her a hand? I hated it."