Folwell was one of those affable leading men who always proffer their leading women as much gallantry as they care to accept. He had been a devoted suitor to Zelma Griffen and had graciously pretended to suffer agonies of jealousy over her humming-bird flirtations. He had done the same with the women stars of his last three engagements. He was Scotch, and had a gift of sad-eyed sincerity for the moment, and a vocabulary of irresistible little pet names, and a grim earnestness about whatever interested him at the time. His real name was, curiously, Robert Burns. He had changed it lest he be suspected of stealing it, or of advertising a much-advertised tobacco.
Eldon imagined that Folwell would begin to languish over Sheila the moment the train started, and was tempted to bash in his head so that he would be incapable of making love at all. He had won into Sheila’s good graces by knocking an anonymous student over the footlights. If he sent a pseudonymous actor the same way he might clinch his success with her. He little knew that the blow he had struck Bret Winfield had not yet ceased to sting that youth, and that Winfield was still repeating his vow to square himself with Eldon and with Sheila—in very different ways.
But Eldon let Folwell escape without planting his fists on him. And he let Sheila escape without imprinting the seal of his kiss upon her. He had never laid lip to her cheek. And now they were divorced, without being betrothed.
If he had known how tenderly Sheila’s thoughts flew back to him, if he had known that she locked herself in her state-room and wept and never once saw Folwell on the train, he would have been happier and sadder both, with the incurable perversity of a forlorn lover. If he could have seen her very soul of souls he would have seen what she dared not admit to herself, that she was a little disappointed in him because he let her go. She doubted the greatness of his love of her because he loved the artist she was so well. Sheila was more jealous of her actress self than of Dulcie Ormerod.
It was not many days before Eldon, too, turned his back on Chicago, but facing westerly. The city was dear to him: he had passed through a whole lifetime of stages there, from crushing failure to success in a leading rôle, and from loneliness to reciprocated love and widowerhood.
Mrs. Vining tried to console him when he turned to her as at least a relative of Sheila’s. She made as much as she could of his performance as Folwell’s successor. It was a creditable and a promising beginning, though it offended her experienced standards in countless ways. But she flattered him with honeyed words, and she tried to wear away his love for Sheila.
She had seen so many nice young fellows and dear, sweet girls stretched on the rack of these situations—wrenched by the wheels of separation and all the suspicions that jealousy can imagine from opportunity. In all mercy she wished this couple well cured of the inflammation. She did her part to allay it with counter-irritants and caustics. She wrote Sheila that Eldon was getting along famously with his rôle—and with Dulcie, who was “a dear little thing and winning excellent press notices.” She told Eldon that Sheila was in love with her new play, and that Tom Brereton was turning her head with his compliments. Folwell, who had the second male rôle in the new play, was also very attentive, she said. And Sheila was going out a good deal in New York—dancing her feet off nearly every night. The author of the play was a third rival for her favor, in Mrs. Vining’s chronicles.
Everything collaborated to Eldon’s torture. The “Friend in Need” company was moving West in long jumps. Sheila’s letters had farther and farther to go. A sudden change of booking threw them off the track and two weeks passed without a line. He sent her day letters and night letters as affectionate in tone as he had the face to submit to the telegraph operators. Her answers did not satisfy him. They were never so prompt as his calculations and he did not credit her with restraint before the cold-eyed telegraphers.
She was far busier, too, than he imagined. Costumes were to be ordered and fitted; the new lines to be learned; photographs to be posed for; interviews to be given. Reben was grooming her for a star already, without giving her an inkling of his schemes. As for flirting with Brereton or Folwell, she was as far as possible from the thought of such a leisurely occupation. She was having battles with them, and still bitterer conflicts with the author.