There was, indeed, one taller than Montgomery, one whose height numbered two or three inches over six feet, but who paid for longitude by a painful meagreness. Archie—for so Jessie called him—was, in very sooth, a protracted tragedy. The son of a groom, he had been, until the age of fifteen or thereabouts, the tiniest, lightest little chap imaginable. Always amid horses, his one ambition was to become a jockey, and he might have succeeded in attaining this aspiration, had not cruel Nature taken it into her head to make him grow! He had sprouted almost visibly, beneath the horrified eyes of his horsey friends, and ere he came to eighteen years had reached the proud—yet hated—height of six feet three. Poor Archie's ambition being thus hopelessly blighted, he had made no effort to settle to any less fascinating career, but earned his daily bread by doing more or less badly whatever came next to hand.
Of such consisted the "star company"! Evarne deemed them all quite suitable individuals to be thus secretly conglomerated in an empty room of a deserted house hidden away behind a hoarding and seemingly forgotten in the very heart of Glasgow. Strange fate that had brought her to form one of the conspiracy!
The rehearsals now proceeded daily, Mr. Punter always giving the cues of "Burns's" and "Clarinda's" parts. The chief difficulty lay in remembering "who was whom" at any given moment. Without exception, all the men played a couple of characters, in some cases even three separate and distinct rôles. Mad-looking Charles Stuart appeared as a prince and as "Clarinda's" footman—a proceeding that appeared to Evarne as the height of absurdity. Charlie swore he had no intention of visiting the barber, and no one, having once seen that weird head above royal robes, could possibly fail to recognise it again, even though the appended body might, next time, chance to be clad in servant's livery. They would at once discern the prince in disguise in "Clarinda's" establishment, and would accordingly look for intricacies of plot—doomed to be disappointed.
If it had not all been really a matter of such serious consequence to her, the girl would have spent her time during these rehearsals in struggling with inopportune laughter. As it was, her expression grew habitually more and more serious as the conviction forced itself like unto a barbed arrow into her brain: "This play is to fail! It is bound to fail! It can never succeed, never; and what can I do then?"
For the present, at all events, there was neither inaction nor loneliness. She made the more intimate acquaintance of Joe Harold and John Montgomery by inviting them, together with Jess, to her lodging one evening for a little private rehearsal of the death-bed scene. To her amusement the men had purchased sausage-rolls, cakes and ginger-beer from the shop round the corner, and the business over, they produced these edibles and invited themselves and their hostess to supper.
The unappetising topic that opened the meal was the universal poverty that prevailed. All had been out of work for some time, it appeared, and, like Evarne, were subsisting painfully on a few paltry and fast-failing savings, until the first week's salary from Mr. Punter should arrive to relieve the situation.
It was the second time in her short career that Evarne had been introduced into an absolutely fresh world. Live and learn! Had the girl given her opinion a month ago, it would probably have been to the effect that all commercial travellers, compositors, and daughters of scene-shifters (for this Jess owned had been her father's avocation in life) were necessarily common and uneducated—even though worthy enough folk. But there was very little either in the speech or ways of her three humble friends that could have appeared either absurd or offensive to the most dainty lady in the land, while Mont, the printer, was remarkably well-informed, handsome, and interesting. Thus for so long, at all events, as Evarne and her commercial traveller and her printer had mutual interests in "Caledonia's Bard," she found them infinitely more congenial than had been the majority of those men in the higher walks of life whom Morris had presented to her.
As a matter of fact, the nature of the society by which she had been surrounded in those bygone days had, from first to last, presented itself as one of the drawbacks of her unfortunate position. Time's progress had, to some considerable extent, blunted the keenness of her susceptibilities in this direction. Still, she now found it passing sweet to receive once again that vague indescribable deference and respect that distinguishes so subtly—perchance so unconsciously—a man's manner towards a "good" woman, from that which he assumes to one whose morals are understood to be "easy."
Yet more strongly did she experience a similar charm in the society of Jessie. The young girl—"who would sooner marry Joe with all his faults and without a penny, because she truly loved him, than marry a lord she didn't care for"—might not have been as witty, as merry, as brightly amusing as some other women whom Evarne could have named, but she was the first self-respecting and respectable member of her own age and sex—save Margaret—whom the girl had known since she left Heatherington.
Those years given to Morris—however brightened and redeemed by her pouring forth the most disinterested and sweetest affection—had been really very lonely—very desolate. When she had first been thrown into contact with the female associates that Morris's men friends had been willing to introduce to her, she had instinctively disliked and shrank from them, even although she had been far too childishly innocent at first to realise to the full the depravity of these "kept" women.