Sheila worked hard, but her material was unpromising—all except her own daughter, whom she had named after Bret’s mother and whom she called “Polly” after her own. Little Polly displayed a strange sincerity, a trace of the Kemble genius for pretending.
When Vickery, who came down to see his work produced and saw little Polly, it was like seeing again the little Sheila whom he still remembered.
He told big Sheila of it, and her eyes grew humid with tenderness.
He said, “I wrote my first play for you—and I’d be willing to write my last for you now if you’d act in it.”
Sheila blessed him for it as if it were a beautiful obituary for her dead self. He did not tell her that he was writing her into his masterpiece, that she was posing for him even now.
On the morning of the performance Miss Mayme Greeley woke up with an attack of hay-fever in full bloom. The June flowers had filled her with a kind of powder that went off like intermittent skyrockets. She began to pack her trunk for immediate flight to a pollenless clime. It looked as if she were trying to sneeze her head into her trunk. There was no possibility of her playing the fairy queen when her every other word was ker-choo!
Sheila saw it coming. Before the committee approached her like a press-gang she knew that she was drafted. She knew the rôle from having rehearsed it. Mayme’s costume would fit her, and if she did not jump into the gap the whole affair would have to be put off.
These were not the least of the sarcasms fate was lavishing on her that her wicked past as an actress, which had kept her under suspicion so long, should be the means of bringing the village to her feet; that the church should drive her back on the stage; that the stage should be a plot of grass, that her own children should play the leading parts, and she be cast for a “bit” in their support.
Thus it was that Sheila returned to the drama, shanghaied as a reluctant understudy. The news of the positive appearance of the great Mrs. Winfield—“Sheila Kemble as was, the famous star, you know”—drew the whole town to the Winfield lawn.
The stage was a level of sward in front of the two birches, with rhododendron-bushes for wings. The audience filled the terraces, the porches, and even the surrounding trees.