"That man!" Mrs. Hope cried.
"Well, all these recent scandals in the Department are making them remove Simmonds; they want somebody beyond the reach of graft; and Ten Euyck has resigned his coronership. What does that look like to you?
"It will be nuts to watch," Wheeler went on. "The force, down in his district, will be shaken up till its teeth rattle. Ten Euyck won't rest contented till he has stopped mice from stealing scraps of cheese! But my leading-woman must be civil to him, now, or he's the sort of fellow to get my license revoked. Nobody's ever run up against his self-righteousness and got away with it, yet. Poor chap, he'd be mighty able if he weren't crazy! I believe I could do a Valjean if I could engage him as Javert!"
"Don't let us speak forever of that bilious person! Why do you distract a poor girl from her work? Come," cried she to Wheeler, "are we going to do our scene?"
She drove her rather reluctant star to action.—"Young miss!" he said, "it is not every ageing favorite who would take a girl on the word of a mutual friend, give her a better part than his own, push her over his own head, and coach her in private into the bargain!" He put his big hand on Christina's shoulder. "But she's worth it!" he said. "A scene with her is a tonic to me—I did not know the old man had so much blood in him! Sally, the poor working-girl, what are you going to do to the critics, that still sleep unconscious? 'Ha—ha! Wait till Monday week!' or whenever we open!
"'They'll be all gangin' East an' West,
They'll be all gane a-glee!
They'll be all gangin' East an' West,
Courtin' Molly Lee!'
"Mr. Herrick, as you come up Broadway, you don't see her name on the bills! But they might as well be printing the paper!—for the younger generation is knocking at the door. Ah, Christina, my dear, thou art thy Wheeler's glass, and he in thee calls back the lovely April of his prime!" His indulgent sardonic glance caught Christina's and the flaming sword of hers drove him to work. They left behind them such a vivid sense of Herrick's having written his play and their having taken it, that he might have thought it a scene of his they were working on.
From the room where they were immured strange sounds occasionally escaped; sometimes Wheeler laughed and sometimes he swore furiously. "She'll get everything that he knows out of him!" said Mrs. Hope with great satisfaction.
Herrick discovered this, in no ignoble sense, to be the keynote of Christina's life. It was borne in upon him with every hour that her work in the theater was the essence of her; that no matter where nor how utterly she should consciously give her heart the unconscious course of her nature would still flow through the field of dramatic endeavor. He might admire or condemn this, like it or leave it; but the jealous humility of his love must recognize it.
She seemed largely to have recovered from the terrors that had enveloped her upon Ingham's death. If for Nancy Cornish she had lain down to die, for her opening night she had got up again. And she was ready to bend the whole world to that night's service. Herrick saw that she had always been so.