“Never mind those beggars—time’s precious—must make the running while you can. I say, Miss Norah, that I love you.”
A gentleman in the row of stalls behind us leant forward, thrusting his head between Mr Hammond’s and mine, and observed—think of it!—
“We have heard you say so once already, sir. Would you mind postponing the repetition of the statement till after the singer has finished. We are waiting to hear the song?”
So far from being nonplussed, or disconcerted, or ashamed, or anything he ought to have been, all that Mr Hammond did do was to adjust his monocle more securely in his eye, and to look at the stage. Seeing that the fact was as stated, and that somebody was about to sing, he apparently appreciated the reasonableness of the stranger’s request, and held his peace; and the singer sang.
What she sang about—she was one of those lovely ladies whom you do find at the Gaiety—I have not an idea. All my ideas were gone. I was more than speechless. There was Walter Hammond, sitting all at once as if he had been carved out of stone, glaring at the stage as if he took not the slightest interest in what was taking place on it. The man behind, when making that unutterably impertinent remark, had slipped a scrap of paper over my shoulder, unnoticed, I presume, by Mr Hammond, and, I hope, by everyone else. It had slid down my bare neck, and had lodged in the top of my bodice. That wicked old person who sat on the other side of the little woman kept his beetroot-coloured face turned almost constantly in my direction; when I moved so much as an eyelash in his, he winked. Short of provoking a scandalous scene, I did not see what I could do to stop it, even if I had had my senses sufficiently about me to do anything, which I really had not. For, endeavouring to avoid his winks, my glances reached a box which was, so to speak, on the other side of the top of his bald head. In it was the brown man. He was standing up in the centre of it, well to the front. Although he shared the box with a lady, he did not allow her presence to deter him in the least. So soon as he caught my eye, he inclined his head in my direction in the most noticeable way, as if we had been quite old friends. The lady, who was young and pretty, and most beautifully dressed, was sitting down on his right, an opera-glass before her eyes, pointed straight at me. When he presumed to bestow on me that movement of recognition, she put down her glass and smiled, and, unless I was mistaken, nodded at me. I was convinced that I had never seen her in my life before. What did she mean? and what did he mean? and what should I do?
Of course, noticing his impertinence was out of the question, though he did look so distinguished standing up there in his beautiful white waistcoat, really my ideal of a handsome man. To avoid him, and to mark my sense of his misconduct, I turned my head right round, so that my glance lighted on the box which was exactly opposite the one in which he was.
It was occupied by the four men.
They were standing up, all in a row. At one end, a little back, was Mr Rumford. He had his hands in his pockets. On his face was an expression which hardly betokened enjoyment of the actors’ and actresses’ efforts to amuse. Next to him was Basil Carter, to whom, from what I had understood, the box belonged. He was apparently not in the best of tempers. Resting his hands on the edge of the box, he glared, first at Mr Hammond, then at me, then at the brown man over the way. I could not honestly assert that he looked pleasantly at either of us. I had learned a good deal about his temper since leaving home. I wondered if Audrey had an inkling of what sort of one he really had. Beside him was Jack Purchase. His arms were crossed upon his chest in what I imagine that he perhaps supposed was a tragic attitude. It reminded me of the pictures in the novelettes which I used to read when I was little—“Lady Lucy’s Lingering Love,” and that sort of thing. They were rather fond of giving illustrations of gentlemen with their arms folded across their chests; and there was something in his face which was a good deal like what used to be on theirs. He looked alternately at the brown man and Mr Hammond as if he would have liked to eat them, though, I daresay, that that was not the impression which the look was intended to convey. With the fingers of one hand he held the brim of his crush hat. Personally, I should not have been a bit surprised if it had come spinning down at Mr Hammond at my side, or if it had gone whirling through the air at the brown man opposite. If he could have used it as a boomerang, and flung it at both, it is my private impression that, in spite of the scandal it would have occasioned, he would have done it. I never saw two men in worse tempers than he and Mr Carter seemed to be just then.
At the further end of the row, completing the quartette, was little Major Tibbet. He was really a pitiable figure. What, I suspect, was his partial consciousness of the fact made it more obvious still. He kept fidgeting from foot to foot, touching himself furtively here and there, as if he doubted if everything was right. And it was not. He seemed to have been in the wars. His wig was on one side, one eyebrow was not only smudgy, but distinctly higher than the other, and something dreadful had happened to his complexion. An earthquake, or some similar cataclysm, seemed to have cracked it, so that on one side of his face quite a large patch of it was missing.
I could not but feel that mamma would not have liked to have seen him in his then condition. She is so particular about men’s appearance, especially those whom she honours with her acquaintance. And if she has the faintest suspicion that her own transformation is in the very slightest degree out of the straight, she nearly worries herself into a fit. What would she have felt if she had seen the singular angle at which the Major’s wig was poised?