The confession would end with a sigh and a new application to the business of tragic-burlesque-comedy. Smarting from the pink lash of a half-penny evening paper, which had, in a leading article that afternoon, cast italicized reflections upon "the porcine Paladius of the people's palaces," the great man was in no very pleasant mood; and this he made manifest directly rehearsal began. Scarcely a dozen lines had been repeated before the leading lady was in tears and the old stock actor sulking at a public-house round the corner. Ladies at twenty-three shillings a week heard themselves addressed in terms which implied their fitness for the position of dummies in a side-show. The stage-manager would infallibly have been visited with blindness if the great man's appeals to unknown powers had been heard. When calm fell, Izard settled himself frettingly in a stall and there simmered a long while in silence. Not for half an hour did an exclamation escape him, and then it came almost involuntarily. He seemed to be waging a battle between his contempt for the leading lady and his fear that she would walk out of the house; and the latter being worsted, he cried aloud, almost like one in despair:
"Etta Romney—Etta Romney—what, in God's name, keeps you out of my theatre!"
A dead silence fell. Everyone was awed by the real pathos of this regret, drawn from a man who had never been the servant of a sentiment. And when a musical voice answered him from the stage-box, opposite prompt, then, indeed, did Charles Izard come as near to collapsing as ever he had done in his unemotional life.
"Nothing keeps me, Mr. Izard. I am here."
"Etta Romney, by God!" he exclaimed, and in the same breath he told them that the rehearsal was over.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE IMPRESARIO'S PRAYER
So the Lady Evelyn had become Etta Romney once more, the child of the theatre, the daughter of a mystery which London was upon the eve of solving. The events which brought her to this resolution are briefly outlined in a letter which she wrote to her father upon the morning after her interview with the great Charles Izard at the Carlton Theatre. No longer ashamed of her resolution, she took up her residence boldly at the Savoy Hotel and entered her own name in the visitors' book, afraid of none.
SAVOY HOTEL,
Thursday.