"I am glad," said Evelyn,—"very glad."
"You are a noble lady," he answered. "Once, long ago, I styled myself your friend, your equal. Now I know better my place and yours, and as from a princess I take your alms. For your letter—that letter, Evelyn, which told me what you thought, which showed me what to do—I humbly thank you."
She let fall her hand from her silken lap, and watched with unseeing eyes the mimicry of life upon the stage before them, where Selima knelt to Tamerlane, and Moneses mourned for Arpasia. Presently she said again, "I am glad;" and then, when they had kept silence for a while, "You will live at Fair View?"
"Ay," he replied. "I will make it well for her here in Virginia."
"You must let me help you," she said. "So old a friend as I may claim that as a right. To-morrow I may visit her, may I not? Now we must look at the players. When she enters there is no need to cry for silence. It comes of itself, and stays; we watch her with straining eyes. Who is that man in a cloak, staring at us from the pit? See, with the great peruke and the scar!"
Haward, bending, looked over the rail, then drew back with a smile. "A half-breed trader," he said, "by name Jean Hugon. Something of a character."
"He looked strangely at us," said Evelyn, "with how haggard a face! My scarf, Mr. Lee? Thank you. Madam, have you the right of the matter from Kitty Page?"
The conversation became general, and soon, the act approaching its end, and other gentlemen pressing into the box which held so beautiful a woman, so great a catch, and so assured a belle as Mistress Evelyn Byrd, Haward arose and took his leave. To others of the brilliant company assembled in the playhouse he paid his respects, speaking deferentially to the Governor, gayly to his fellow Councilors and planters, and bowing low to many ladies. All this was in the interval between the acts. At the second parting of the curtain he resumed his former station in the pit. With intention he had chosen a section of it where were few of his own class. From the midst of the ruder sort he could watch her more freely, could exult at his ease in her beauty both of face and mind.
The curtains parted, and the fiddlers strove for warlike music. Tamerlane, surrounded by the Tartar host, received his prisoners, and the defiant rant of Bajazet shook the rafters. All the sound and fury of the stage could not drown the noise of the audience. Idle talk and laughter, loud comment upon the players, went on,—went on until there entered Darden's Audrey, dressed in red silk, with a jeweled circlet like a line of flame about her dark flowing hair. The noise sank, voices of men and women died away; for a moment the rustle of silk, the flutter of fans, continued, then this also ceased.
She stood before the Sultan, wide-eyed, with a smile of scorn upon her lips; then spoke in a voice, low, grave, monotonous, charged like a passing bell with warning and with solemn woe. The house seemed to grow more still; the playgoers, box and pit and gallery, leaned slightly forward: whether she spoke or moved or stood in silence, Darden's Audrey, that had been a thing of naught, now held every eye, was regnant for an hour in this epitome of the world. The scene went on, and now it was to Moneses that she spoke. All the bliss and anguish of unhappy love sounded in her voice, dwelt in her eye and most exquisite smile, hung upon her every gesture. The curtains closed; from the throng that had watched her came a sound like a sigh, after which, slowly, tongues were loosened. An interval of impatient waiting, then the music again and the parting curtains, and Darden's Audrey,—the girl who could so paint very love, very sorrow, very death; the girl who had come strangely and by a devious path from the height and loneliness of the mountains to the level of this stage and the watching throng.