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The theatre would fill again with men whose palates required the highly seasoned, the far-fetched. The critics would rejoice in their victory, and welcome Helen Merival to her rightful place with added fervor.
"What right had I to force my ferocious theories upon her?" he asked himself, and at the moment it seemed that he had completely destroyed her prestige. She was plainly dispirited, and her auditors looked at one another in astonishment. "Can this sad woman in gray, struggling with a cold audience and a group of dismayed actors, be the brilliant and beautiful Helen Merival?"
"It was impossible that I should succeed so quickly, so easily, even with the help of one so powerful as Helen Merival. It is my fate to work for what I get." And with this return of his belief that to himself alone he must look for victory, his self-poise and self-confidence came back.
Yes, I can see that would be exciting business; but what's all this about your engagement to some big actress?" This brought the blood to the younger man's cheek, but he was studiedly careless in reply. "All newspaper talk. Of course, in rehearsing the play, I saw a great deal of Miss Merival, but that's all.
Helen, catching sight of her lover, lifted her hand and called to him, and though he shrank from entering the throng he obeyed. Those who recognized him fell back with a sort of awe of his good-fortune. Helen reached her hand, saying, huskily, "I am tired take me away." He took her arm and turned to the people still crowding to speak to her. "Friends, Miss Merival is very weary.
Hugh approached him with lowering brows and clinched hands. "You've done it now. You've broken her nerve, and she'll fail in her part. Haven't you any sense? We pick you off the street and feed you and clothe you and do your miserable plays and you rush in here and strike my sister, Helen Merival, in the face. I ought to kick you into the street!"
The bill-boards would glow again with magnificent posters of Helen Merival, as Alessandra, stooping with wild eyes and streaming hair over her slain paramour on the marble stairway, a dagger in her hand. People would crowd again behind the scenes at the close of the play. The magazines would add their chorus of praise.
The manager lifted his fat shoulders in a convulsive shrug. His face indicated despair of her folly. "Good Gott! Well, you are the doctor, only remember there will not be one hundred people in the house to-night." He began to recover speech. "Think of that! Helen Merival playing to empty chairs in my theatre. Himmel!" "It is sad, I confess, but not hopeless, Herr Westervelt.
Each night after a careful toilet he took his stand in the lobby watching with calculating eye and impassive face the stream of people rushing by his door. "If we could only catch one in a hundred?" he said to Westervelt. "I never expected to see Helen Merival left like this. I didn't think it possible. I thought she could make any piece go. To play to fifty dollars was out of my reckoning.
Her tone steadied the man, for he was a really brilliant and famous actor beginning to break. He grew courtly. "Miss Merival, I assure you I shall be all right to-night." At this Douglass, tense and hot, shouted an angry word, and rushed into the semi-darkness of the side aisle. There Helen found him when she came off, his face black with anger and disgust. "It's all off," he said.
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