Matravers’ luncheon party marked the termination for some time of any confidential intercourse between Berenice and himself. Every moment of her time was claimed by Fergusson, who, in his anxiety to produce a play from which he hoped so much before the wane of the season, gave no one any rest, and worked himself almost into a fever. There were two full rehearsals a day, and many private ones at her rooms. Matravers calling there now and then found Fergusson always in possession, and by degrees gave it up in despair. He had a horror of interfering in any way, even of being asked for his advice concerning the practical reproduction of his work. Fergusson’s invitations to the rehearsals at the theatre he rejected absolutely. As the time grew shorter, Berenice became pale and almost haggard with the unceasing work which Fergusson’s anxiety imposed upon her. One night she sent for Matravers, and hastening to her rooms, he found her for the first time alone.

[Pg 149-50]

“I have sent Mr. Fergusson home,” she exclaimed, welcoming him with outstretched hands, but making no effort to rise from her easy chair. “Do you know that man is driving me slowly mad? I want you to interfere.”

“What can I do?” he said.

“Anything to bring him to reason! He is over-rehearsing! Every line, every sentence, every gesture, he makes the subject of the most exhaustive deliberation. He will have nothing spontaneous; it is positively stifling. A few more days of it and my reason will go! He is a great actor, but he does not seem to understand that to reduce everything to mathematical proportions is to court failure.”

“I will go and see him,” Matravers said. “You wish for no more rehearsals, then?”

“I do not want to see his face again before the night of the performance,” she declared vehemently. “I am perfect in my part. I have thought about it—dreamed about it. I have lived more as ‘Bathilde’ than as myself for the last three weeks. Perhaps,” she continued more slowly, “you will not be satisfied. I scarcely dare to hope that you will be. Yet I have reached my limitations. The more I am made to rehearse now, the less natural I shall become.”

“I will speak to Fergusson,” Matravers promised. “I will go and see him to-night. But so far as you are concerned, I have no fear; you will be the ‘Bathilde’ of my heart and my brain. You cannot fail!”

She rose to her feet. “It is,” she said, “The desire of my life to make your ‘Bathilde’ a creature of flesh and blood. If I fail, I will never act again.”

“If you fail,” he said, “the fault will be in my conception, not in your execution. But indeed we will not consider anything so improbable. Let us put the play behind us for a time and talk of something else! You must be weary of it.”

She shook her head. “Not that! never that! Just now it is my life, only it is the details which weary me, the eternal harping upon the mechanical side of it. Will you read to me for a little? and I will make you some coffee. You are not in a hurry, are you?”

“I have come,” he said, “to stay with you until you send me away! I will read to you with pleasure. What will you have?”

She handed him a little volume of poems; he glanced at the title and made a faint grimace. They were his own.

Nevertheless, he read for an hour, till the streets below grew silent, and his own voice, unaccustomed to such exercise, lost something of its usual clearness. Then he laid the volume down, and there was silence between them.

“I have been thinking,” he said at last, “of a singular incident in connection with your performance at the New Theatre; it was brought into my mind just then. I meant to have mentioned it before.”

She looked up with only a slight show of interest. Those days at the theatre seemed to her now to be very far behind. There was nothing in connection with them which she cared to remember.

“It was the night of my first visit there,” he continued. “There is a terrible scene at the end of the second act between Herdrine and her husband—you recollect it, of course. Just as you finished your denunciation, I distinctly heard a curious cry from the back of the house. It was a greater tribute to your acting than the applause, for it was genuine.”

“The piece was gloomy enough,” she remarked, “to have dissolved the house in tears.”

“At least,” he said, “it wrung the heart of one man. For I have not told you all. I was interested enough to climb up into the amphitheatre. The man sat there alone amongst a wilderness of empty seats. He was the picture of abject misery. I could scarcely see his face, but his attitude was convincing. It was not a thing of chance either. I made some remark about him to an attendant, and he told me that night after night that man had occupied the same seat, always following every line of the play with the same mournful concentration, never speaking to any one, never moving from his seat from the beginning of the play to the end.”

“He must have been,” she declared, “a person of singularly morbid taste. When I think of it now I shiver. I would not play Herdrine again for worlds.”

“I am very glad to hear you say so,” he said, smiling. “Do you know that to me the most interesting feature of the play was its obvious effect upon this man. Its extreme pessimism is too much paraded, is laid on altogether with too thick a hand to ring true. The thing is an involved nightmare. One feels that as a work of art it is never convincing, yet underneath it all there must be something human, for it found its way into the heart of one man.”

“It is possible,” she remarked, “that he was mad. The man who found it sufficiently amusing to come to the theatre night after night could scarcely have been in full possession of his senses.”

“That is possible,” he admitted; “but I do not believe it. The man’s face was sad enough, but it was not the face of a madman.”

“You did see his face, then?”

“On the last night of the play,” he continued. “You remember you were going on to Lady Truton’s, so I did not come behind. But I had a fancy to see you for a moment, and I came round into Pitt Street just as you were driving off. On the other side of the way this man was standing watching you!”

She looked at him with a suddenly kindled interest—or was it fear?—in her dark eyes. The colour had left her cheeks; she was white to the lips.

“Watching me?”

“Yes. As your carriage drove off he stood watching it. I don’t know what prompted me, but I crossed the street to speak to him. He seemed such a lone, mournful figure standing there half dazed, shabby, muttering softly to himself. But when he saw me coming, he gave one half-frightened look at me and ran, literally ran down the street on to the Strand. I could not follow,—the police would have stopped him. So he disappeared.”

“You saw his face. What was he like?”

Berenice had leaned right back amongst the yielding cushions of her divan, and he could scarcely see her face. Yet her voice sounded to him strange and forced. He looked at her in some surprise.

“I had a glimpse of it. It was an ordinary face enough; in fact, it disappointed me a little. But the odd part of it was that it seemed vaguely familiar to me. I have seen it before, often. Yet, try as I will, I cannot recollect where, or under what circumstances.”

“At Oxford,” she suggested. “By the bye, what was your college?”

“St. John’s. No, I do not think,—I hope that it was not at Oxford. Some day I shall think of it quite suddenly.”

Berenice rose from her chair with a sudden, tempestuous movement and stood before him.

“Listen!” she exclaimed. “Supposing I were to tell you that I knew or could guess who that man was—why he came! Oh, if I were to tell you that I were a fraud, that——”

Matravers stopped her.

“I beg,” he said, “that you will tell me nothing!”

There was a short silence. Berenice seemed on the point of breaking down. She was nervously lacing and interlacing her fingers. Her breath was coming spasmodically.

“Berenice,” he said softly, “you are over-wrought; you are not quite yourself to-night. Do not tell me anything. Indeed, there is no need for me to know; just as you are I am content with you, and proud to be your friend.”

“Ah!”

She sat down again. He could not see her face, but he fancied that she was weeping. He himself found his customary serenity seriously disturbed. Perhaps for the first time in his life he found himself not wholly the master of his emotions. The atmosphere of the little room, the perfume of the flowers, the soft beauty of the woman herself, whose breath fell almost upon his cheek, affected him as nothing of the sort had ever done before. He rose abruptly to his feet.

“You will be so much better alone,” he said, taking her fingers and smoothing them softly in his for a moment. “I am going away now.”

“Yes. Good-by!”

At the threshold he paused. She had not looked up at him. She was still sitting there with bowed head and hidden face. He closed the door softly, and went out.