… Cairns was at the door. "Did you say, Beth, that the Grey One is engaged to be married?"
"Pure tragedy. The man is fifty and financial…. She's a courageous girl, but I think under her dear smile is a broken nerve. She has about reached the end of her rope. The demand for her work has fallen off. One of those inexplicable things. She had such a good start after returning from Paris. And now with Handel's expensive studio, probably not less than three thousand a year for that, debt and unsought pictures are eating out her heart. There's much more to the story—I mean leading up. Help her if you can, or she must go to the arms and house of a certain rich man…. What a blithe thing is Life, and how little you predatory men know about it!"
They regarded each other, their thoughts poised upon an If. Beth spoke first:
"If your friend——"
"But Bedient didn't look into the eyes of the Grey One when he told his tale of the sea," Cairns said, leaving.
TWELFTH CHAPTER
TWO LESSER ADVENTURES
A few nights after the party, Bedient was left to his own devices, Cairns being appointed out of town. He attended the performance of a famous actress in Hedda Gabler…. Bedient was early. The curtain interested him. It pictured an ancient Grecian ruin, a gloomy, heavy thing, but not inartistic. Beneath was a couplet from Kingsley:
"So fleet the works of men, back to their earth again,
Ancient and holy things fade like a dream."
Sensitive to such effects, he sat, musing and contemplative, when suddenly his spirit was imperiously aroused by the orchestra. The 'celli had opened the Andante from the C Minor Symphony. For ten minutes, the music held his every sense…. It unfolded as of old, but not its full message. There was a meaning in it for him! He heard the three voices—man, woman and angel. It was the woman's tragedy. The lustrous Third Presence was for her. The man's figure was obscure, disintegrate…. Bedient was so filled with the mystery, that the play had but little surface of his consciousness during the first act. He enjoyed it, but could not give all he had. Finally, as Hedda was ordering the young writer to drink wine to get "vine-leaves in his hair," there was an explosion back of the scenes. Bedient, as did many others, thought at first it belonged to the piece. The faces of the players fell away in thick gloom, the voices sank into crazy echoes, and the curtain went down. Bedient's last look at the stage brought him the impression of squirming chaos. Fire touched the curtain behind, disfiguring and darkening the pictured ruin. Then a woman near him screamed. The back of a chair snapped, and now scores took up the woman's cry.