“Only Miss Holgar to come,” Davidson said to me, with a smile that seemed to ask for friendship. “We’ve only a small cast, you know; five.”
“I am expecting one more after Miss Holgar,” amended Varduk, and Davidson made haste to add: “That’s right, an expert antiquary—Judge Keith Pursuivant. He’s going to look at our manuscript and say definitely if it is genuine.”
Not until then did Varduk invite me to sit down, waving me to a comfortable chair at one end of his desk. I groped in my pockets for a cigarette, but he pressed upon me a very long and very good cigar.
“I admire tobacco in its naked beauty,” he observed with the wraith of a smile, and himself struck a match for me. Again I admired the whiteness of his hand, its pointed fingers and strong sensitivity of outline. Such hands generally betoken nervousness, but Varduk was serene. Even the fall of his fringed lids over those plumbless eyes seemed a deliberate motion, not an unthought wink.
Yet again a knock at the door, a brief colloquy and an ushering in by Elmo Davidson. This time it was Sigrid.
I got to my feet, as unsteady as a half-grown boy at his first school dance. Desperately I prayed not to look so moved as I felt. As for Sigrid, she paused and met my gaze frankly, with perhaps a shade’s lightening of her gently tanned cheeks. She was a trifle thinner than when I had last seen her five years ago, and wore, as usual, a belted brown coat like an army officer’s. Her hair, the blondest unbleached hair I have ever known, fell to her shoulders and curled at its ends like a full-bottomed wig in the portrait of some old cavalier. There was a green flash in it, as in a field of ripened grain. Framed in its two glistening cascades, her face was as I had known it, tapering from brow to chin over valiant cheekbones and set with eyes as large as Varduk’s and bluer than Davidson’s. She wore no makeup save a touch of rouge upon her short mouth—cleft above and full below, like a red heart. Even with low-heeled shoes, she was only two inches shorter than I.
“Am I late?” she asked Varduk, in that deep, shy voice of hers.
“Not a bit,” he assured her. Then he saw my awkward expectation and added, with monumental tact for which I blessed him fervently, “I think you know Mr. Gilbert Connatt.”
Again she turned to me. “Of course,” she replied. “Of course I know him. How do you do, Gib?”
I took the hand she extended and, greatly daring, bent to kiss it. Her fingers fluttered against mine, but did not draw away. I drew her forward and seated her in my chair, then found a backless settee beside her. She smiled at me once, sidewise, and took from my package the cigarette I had forsaken for Varduk’s cigar.
A hearty clap on my shoulder and a cry of greeting told me for the first time that little Jake Switz had entered with her.
Varduk’s brief but penetrating glance subdued the exuberant Jake. We turned toward the desk and waited.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” began Varduk, seriously but not heavily, “a newfound piece of Lord Byron’s work is bound to be a literary sensation. We hope also to make a theatrical sensation, for our newfound piece is a play.
“A study of Lord Byron evokes varied impressions and appeals. Carlyle thought him a mere dandy, lacking Mr. Brummel’s finesse and good humor, while Goethe insisted that he stood second only to Shakespeare among England’s poets. His mistress, the Countess Guiccioli, held him literally to be an angel; on the other hand, both Lamartine and Southey called him Satan’s incarnation. Even on minor matters—his skill at boxing and swimming, his depth of scholarship, his sincerity in early amours and final espousal of the Greek rebels—the great authorities differ. The only point of agreement is that he had color and individuality.”
He paused and picked up some of the papers from his desk.
“We have here his lost play, Ruthven. Students know that Doctor John Polidori wrote a lurid novel of horror called The Vampire, and that he got his idea, or inspiration, or both, from Byron. Polidori’s tale in turn inspired the plays of Nodier and Dumas in French, and of Planché and Boucicault in English. Gilbert and Sullivan joked with the story in Ruddigore, and Bram Stoker read it carefully before attempting Dracula. This manuscript,” again he lifted it, “is Byron’s original. It is, as I have said, a drama.”
His expressive eyes, bending upon the page in the dimness, seemed to shed a light of their own. “I think that neither Mr. Connatt nor Miss Vining has seen the play. Will you permit me to read?” He took our consent for granted, and began: “Scene, Malvina’s garden. Time, late afternoon—Aubrey, sitting at Malvina’s feet, tells his adventures.”
Since Ruthven is yet unpublished, I take the liberty of outlining it as I then heard it for the first time. Varduk’s voice was expressive, and his sense of drama good. We listened, intrigued and then fascinated, to the opening dialog in which young Aubrey tells his sweetheart of his recent adventures in wildest Greece. The blank verse struck me, at least, as being impressive and not too stiff, though better judges than I have called Byron unsure in that medium. Varduk changed voice and character for each role, with a skill almost ventriloquial, to create for us the illusion of an actual drama. I found quite moving Aubrey’s story of how bandits were beaten off single-handed by his chance acquaintance, Lord Ruthven. At the point where Aubrey expresses the belief that Ruthven could not have survived the battle:
“I fled, but he remained; how could one man,
Even one so
