When she looked at Eldon she saw him as the ragged, hungry beggar at the stage door. She saw him turned away and she feared that he might die, though she knew that he still lived. There was genuine anxiety in her voice when she demanded, “How on earth did you ever manage to succeed?”
“I haven’t succeeded yet,” said Eldon, “or even begun to, but I am still alive. It’s hard to get food and employment in New York, but somehow it’s harder still to starve there. One way or another I kept at work and hounded the managers. And one day I happened in at a manager’s office just as he was firing an actor who thought he had some rights in the world. He snapped me up with an offer of twenty-five dollars a week. If he had offered me a million it wouldn’t have seemed any bigger.”
Mrs. Vining had listened with unwonted interest and with some difficulty, for sleep had been tugging at her heavy old eyelids. As soon as she heard that Eldon had arrived in haven at last she felt no further necessity of attention and fell asleep on the instant.
Sheila sighed with relief, too. And the train had purred along contentedly for half a mile before she realized that after all Eldon was not with that company, but with this. Seeing that her aunt was no longer with them in spirit, she lowered her voice to comment:
“But if you went with the other troupe, what are you doing here?”
“Well, you see, I thought I ought to tell Mrs. Sanchez the good news. I thought she would be glad to hear it, and I was going to offer her the commission for all the work she had done and all the time she had spent on me. She looked disappointed when I told her, and she warned me that the manager was unreliable and the play a gamble. She had just found me a position with a company taking an assured success to the road. It was this play of yours. The part was small and the pay was smaller still, but it was good for forty weeks.
“But I was ambitious, and I told her I would take the other. I wanted to create—that was the big word I used—I wanted to ‘create’ a new part. She told me that the first thing for an actor to do was to connect with a steady job, but I wouldn’t listen to her till finally she happened to mention something that changed my mind.”
He flushed with an excitement that roused Sheila’s curiosity. When he did not go on, she said:
“But what was it that changed your mind?”
Eldon smiled comfortably, and, emboldened by the long attention of his audience, ventured to murmur the truth: “I had seen you act—in New York—in this play, and I—I thought that you were a wonderful actress, and more than that—the most—the most—Well, anyway, Mrs. Sanchez happened to mention that you would be with this company, so I took the part of the taxicab-driver. But I found I was farther away from you than ever—till—till last night.”