'Pooh!' said Miss Belmont, pettishly drawing back from him. 'That won't do. Try again.'

They harked back to the beginning of the scene. The others had stolen away to their various dressing-rooms. Only the stage-manager was left, and he was engaged in talking with the leader of the orchestra, who had just come in with a fiddle-case beneath his arm peeping out from his shabby paletot The farewell speech came, and it was only breathed. She had always dearly, dearly loved him. She had lost him by her pride, her coquetry--her silly, silly, heartless coquetry. Her fingers touched him on the cheek soft as a snowflake, and lingered there whilst the cooing voice went on. Then came the 'Good-bye' again and the answering call.

She paused and looked, and darted to him, and they clung together, she leaning back her head and tangling his eyes in hers.

'You hold me like that,' she breathed, 'until the curtain falls,'

She released herself gradually from his embrace, and drew away. Paul's pulses beat to a strange tune, and he was afraid to look at her.

'Ah!' she said, in a voice so commonplace that he jumped to hear it, 'the kind creatures have left us half a bottle. One gla.s.s, Mr.

Armstrong, will do you good. You dress with Berry; h.e.l.l help you with your make-up. Don't be nervous. You've got the book to prop you till the very end, and there you'll be as right as rain. Here's luck to your first appearance.'

Paul took the gla.s.s she held out to him, but his hand trembled so that he spilled one half its contents on the stage.

'How clumsy!' purred the leading lady. 'Here, take a full gla.s.s; there's more in the bottle. There; c.h.i.n.k gla.s.ses. Luck for to-night.'

He drank mechanically, and the stinging wine threw him into a fit of coughing. Miss Belmont patted him laughingly on the back, and ran away to her own room. Paul took his part from the stage, and tumbled up a spiral iron staircase to the loft in which the leading comedian dressed.

'You'd better wear Bannister's togs, if they'll fit you,' said the comedian; 'if not, you'll want a dress-suit for the second act.'

The clothes fitted excellently, and Berry saw to the neophyte's make-up, painting and powdering him dexterously, and dressing the virginal beard and moustache with a dark cosmetic.

'You're funking it,' the comedian said cheerfully. 'That's all right, my boy; there never was a man worth his salt who didn't. Give me a new part, and I'm as nervous as a cat. But you're in luck in a way, for we've all been together so long in this that we could play it in our sleep. There isn't one of us that doesn't know the thing inside-out and upside-down and backwards.'

Paul crept down the spiral staircase, part in hand, and listened whilst the local manager, who rather prided himself on his ability as an orator, deplored the serious and sudden indisposition of that established favourite, Mr. Bannister, and announced that Mr. Armstrong had 'gallantly stepped into the breach,' and would essay the part, literally at a moment's notice. Paul would most certainly have ungallantly bolted out of the breach had that been possible; but the people cheered the local manager cordially, and he, stepping back into the gloom of the stage, found Paul shivering there, and tried to hearten him.

The night went by in a sort of fog, but Paul read his lines somehow, and made his crosses at the right places; and actors are eager to answer to any little courtesy from a manager, and Darco's half-dozen of champagne was richly paid for by the _elan_ with which everybody played. As to the neophyte, they fed and nursed him, and were in at the close of every speech of his with a spring and a rattle which made the audience half forget the artificiality of the scenes he clouded. Mr. Berry took as much whisky-and-water as was good for him, and perhaps a little more, and Paul in his nervous anxiety lent a helpful hand towards the emptying of the bottle. There was no buzz in the cast-iron head and no cloud in the eyes, but he was strung to a strange tension, and he was looking forward to that last act and the embrace which crowned it.

'I shan't take the book for this last scene,' he whispered to the prompter; 'but watch me, will you?'

The prompter nodded, and Paul pa.s.sed on to the spot from which he was to make his entrance. There was Miss Belmont waiting also. She was in evening dress, with shining white arms and shoulders.

'Fit?' she asked laconically, b.u.t.toning a glove.

'Middling,' said Paul hoa.r.s.ely.

She slid away from him through the painted doorway, and he heard her voice on the stage. There was a pause, and someone near him whispered:

'Mr. Armstrong, go on; they're waiting.'

He obeyed. The practised woman, cool as a cuc.u.mber, gave him his cue a second time, and continued to make the pause look rational He plunged into the scene, awkward and constrained, but resolute, and in some degree master of himself. It was his stage business to be awkward and constrained, but he fared not over well, for on the stage it is easy to go too close to nature. But at the very last he lost his nervous tremors, and in the one scene in which he had been coached so often he acquitted himself with credit.

'Can't you see?' he asked in the final line of his piece, and the leading lady was in his arms again.

'I can see,' she whispered. 'Kiss me, you silly boy!'

And Paul bent his lips to hers, and kissed her in a way which looked theatrically emotional to the house. The roller came down with a thud.

'Stay as you are,' she said; 'there is a call.'

The curtain rose again and fell again, and Paul held the leading lady in his arms. The embrace lasted little more than a minute, but it left Paul frantically in love--after a fashion.

This was bad in many ways, for the woman was eight years his senior and a most heartless coquette, and Paul's infatuation kept him from his own thoughts, which were just beginning to be of value to him.

The Dreamer in the mountains grieved wistfully as the old times enacted themselves before him. 'Love,' says blackguard Iago, 'is a l.u.s.t of the blood and a permission of the will.' Well, one-and-twenty made his dreams even out of such poor material. The westward train boomed past, invisible from first to last in the smoke-cloud.

CHAPTER XI

Miss Belmont, nine-and-twenty, fresh and fair, ignorant-clever (after the known feminine fashion), _rusee_ to the finger-tips, with a dragon reputation for virtue and a resolute will to keep it, was dangerous to the peace of mind of masculine twenty-one. She made Paul her bondslave.

She intoxicated him with a touch, and sobered him with a face of sudden marble. She played the matron and the sister with him, and drove him mad between whiles.

Here is one scene out of hundreds, all acted to the Solitary's mind as if the past were back again.

Summer was dying. The woods were yet l.u.s.ty but growing sombre. Level beams of parting sunlight flashing through the trees like white-hot wire. A Sunday picnic for the company, magnificently provided by Darco, had brought Paul and Miss Belmont together. The lady had led the way into this solitude with so much tact and skill that Paul took pride in his own generalship. They sat on a rustic bench together, and immediately before them was an opening in the trees. At a very little distance the ground fell suddenly away, and in the valley wound a shining river with fold on fold of wooded lands beyond.

Paul was quivering to be nearer to her, but he had no courage to move.

He looked at her, and her eyes seemed to be dreaming on the distant hills. He stole a timid hand towards her very slowly. She turned towards him with a soft smile, took the hand in her own, and held it, nestling her shoulders into the rustic woodwork and sending her dreamy gaze back to the hills again. Once or twice, as if unconsciously, she lifted the hand slightly and laid it down again caressingly.

Paul looked at her adoringly. It was like being in heaven, with a touch of vertigo.

'Claudia,' said Paul, in a whisper.

'Yes,' she answered. 'Don't speak louder than that. It suits the place to whisper. What are you thinking about?'

'You,' said Paul 'I think of nothing else.'

'You silly boy,' said Miss Belmont. 'Why should you think about me?'

'I can't help it I wake up to think of you. I think of you all day. I go to sleep thinking of you. I dream about you in the night-time.'

'Oh, you silly Paul!' Her lips smiled, but her eyes dreamed unchangingly on the landscape. 'Why do you think of me?'

'Because I love you,' said Paul.

The hand which held his own seemed to encourage him to draw nearer, and yet the sign, if there were any sign at all, was so faint that he was afraid to obey it She turned her head slowly to look at him. Her round soft chin stirred the lace at her shoulder and was half hidden by it, and she sat placidly dreaming at his ardent eyes just as she had dreamed at the hills.

'I think you do,' she said sweetly; 'but that is all nonsense. You are only a boy, and I am a middle-aged woman.'

'Middle-aged!' said Paul, with a fiery two-syllabled laugh of scorn at the idea.

'A woman is middle-aged at five-and-twenty. Didn't you know that, Paul?

She took his hand within her own, and played with it 'What a beautiful hand!' she said. 'But you don't take care of it. You treat it carelessly. Now, I spend half an hour on my hands every day. Let me show you the difference,' and she began to draw off her glove.

'Let me,' said Paul, and she surrendered the hand and he peeled the glove from it delicately, and held the white wonder in his own palm. He stooped and kissed it in an idiot rapture. 'How happy you make me!' he said, looking up with tears in his eyes. 'How I love you!'

She stroked his cheek and his hair with the soft ungloved hand, smiling softly at him. He prisoned the hand again, and kissed it again.