STAGE THREE

The weeks sped by.  Gladys Martin went on the Stage, and thanks to beauty and influence, rather than to talent—­though in the latter respect she was certainly not wanting—­she became an immediate success.  Her photos, some taken alone, and some with Bromley Burnham, occupied a conspicuous place in all the weekly illustrateds, and in innumerable shop windows.  People talked of her as they do of all actresses.  Some said her father was a broken-down peer; some, a needy parson, and some, a policeman!  Some said the Duke of Warminster was madly in love with her; others that Seaton Smyth, the notorious Cabinet Minister, was pining for a divorce on her behalf, and others, that she was seldom seen off the stage—­she was entertaining the King of the Belgians.

“I’ve met her,” Lilian Rosenberg said to Shiel, as they stopped one evening to gaze at Gladys’s portraits outside the Imperial Theatre.  “She came to our place to have a dream interpreted, and I thought nothing of her.  I don’t admire her the least bit in the world, do you?”

“I do,” Shiel replied, rather sharply.

“Why, you sound quite angry,” Lilian Rosenberg laughed.  “One would think you knew her.  I wonder if Bromley Burnham is very much in love with her!  He looks as if he were in these photographs!  Do you think it possible for a man and woman to make love to each other every night on the stage, like they do, without one or other of them being affected?”

“I really couldn’t say,” Shiel replied.  “I’m no authority on such matters—­they don’t interest me in the least.”

But this was an untruth—­they did interest him—­and very much, too.  He seldom, indeed, thought of anything else.  Had Gladys fallen in love with Bromley Burnham?  Could she resist the fascinations of so handsome a man?  He did not, of course, pay any heed to the gossip that coupled her name with dukes and other notorieties.  He knew Gladys too well for that, but when he saw her thus photographed, clasped in the arms of Bromley Burnham, he had grave apprehensions.  He longed to see her—­to ask her if she were still free; but his every attempt failed.  She always avoided him, and there was no other alternative save to further his scheme—­his scheme for crushing the Sorcery Company—­and to hope for the best.

And in these dark days of his life, when he was tormented by the yellow demon of jealousy, and at the same time endured hunger, Lilian Rosenberg was his solacing angel.  Utterly regardless of appearances—­she did not exaggerate when she said, “I am not conventional; I don’t care twopence for Mrs. Grundy.”  She visited him in his garret, and she seldom went empty-handed.

“I don’t want your things,” he rudely expostulated, when she loaded his table with cold chicken, jellies and potted meats.  “I’m not starving.”

“Yes, you are,” she said, “and you’ve got to eat all I bring you.”  And she made him eat.  She made him, too, go for walks with her, and she insisted that he should go with her on Saturday afternoons for long rambles in the country, knowing all the time that Kelson was eating his heart out for love of her, and prophesying all kinds of terrible happenings to himself, unless she returned his affections.