The Christian: A Story

by Sir Hall Caine

The second night at the theatre passed much like the first, except that the ladies were visited between the acts by a group of fellow-artistes from another company, and then the free-and-easy manners of familiar intercourse gave way to a style that was most circumspect and precise, and, after the fashion of great ladies, they talked together of morning calls and leaving cards and five-o'clock tea.

There was a scene in the performance in which the three girls sang together, and Glory crept out to the head of the stairs to listen. When she returned to the dressing-room her heart was bounding, and her eyes, as she saw them in the glass, seemed to be leaping out of her head. It was ridiculous! To think of all that fame, all that fuss about voices like those, about singing like that, while she—if she could only get a hearing!

But the cloud had chased the sunshine from her face in a moment, and she was murmuring again, “O God, do not punish a vain, presumptuous creature!”

All the same she felt happy and joyous, and on the third night she was down at the theatre earlier than the other dressers, and was singing to herself as she laid out the costumes, for her heart was beginning to be light. Suddenly she became aware of some one standing at the open door. It was an elderly man, with a bald head and an owlish face. He was the stage manager; his name was Sefton.

“Go on, my girl,” he said. “If you've got a voice like that, why don't you let somebody hear it?”

Her plump ladyship arrived late that night, and her companions were dressed and waiting when she swept into the room like a bat with outstretched wings, crying: “Out o' the wy! Betty Bellman's coming! She's lyte.”

There were numerous little carpings, backbitings, and hypocrisies during the evening, and they reached a climax when Betty said, “Lord Bobbie is coming to-night, my dear.” “Not if I know it, my love,” said the tall lady. “We are goin' to supper at the Nell Gwynne Club, dearest.” “Surprised at ye, my darling.” “You are a nice one to preach, my pet!”

After that encounter two of their ladyships, who were kissing and hugging on the stage, were no longer on speaking terms in the dressing-room, and as soon as might be after the curtain had fallen, the tall lady and the little one swept out of the place with mysterious asides about a “friend being a friend,” and “not staying there to see nothing done shabby.”

“If she don't like she needn't, my dear,” said the boycotted one, and then she dismissed Glory for the night with a message to the friend who would be waiting on the stage.

The atmosphere of the dressing-room had become oppressive and stifling that night, and, notwithstanding the exaltation of her spirits since the stage manager had spoken to her, Glory was sick and ashamed. The fires of her ambition were struggling to burn under the drenching showers that had fallen upon her modesty, and she felt confused and compromised.