When the curtain fell, Edward Wallace could have had few doubts--if he had ever cherished any--of the success of his play. He himself escaped behind the scenes as soon as Miss Bretherton's last recall was over, and the box was filled in his absence with a stream of friends, and a constant murmur of congratulation, which was music in the ears of Madame de Châteauvieux, and, for the moment, silenced in Kendal his own throbbing and desolate consciousness.
'There never was a holiday turned to such good account before,' a gray-haired dramatic critic was saying to her, a man with whose keen, good-natured face London had been familiar for the last twenty years. 'What magic has touched the beauty, Madame de Châteauvieux? Last spring we all felt as though one fairy godmother at least had been left out at the christening. And now it would seem as though even she had repented of it, and brought her gift with the rest. Well, well, I always felt there was something at the bottom in that nature that might blossom yet. Most people who are younger at the trade than I would not hear of it. It was commonly agreed that her success would last just as long as the first freshness of her beauty, and no more. And _now_--the English stage has laid its hold at last upon a great actress.'
Madame de Châteauvieux's smiling reply was broken by the reappearance of Wallace, round whom the buzz of congratulation closed with fresh vigour.
'How is she?' asked Madame de Châteauvieux, laying a hand on his arm. 'Tired?'
'Not the least! But, of course, all the strain is to come. It is amazing, you know, this reception. It's almost more trying than the acting. Forbes in the wings, looking on, is a play in himself!'
In another minute the hubbub had swept out again, and the house had settled into silence.
Macias was the central figure of the second act. In the great scene of explanation between himself and Elvira, after he had forced his way into her apartment, his fury of jealous sarcasm, broken by flashes of the old absolute trust, of the old tender worship, had been finely conceived, and was well rendered by the promising young actor, whom Wallace had himself chosen for the part, Elvira, overwhelmed by the scorn and despair of her lover, and, conscious of the treachery which has separated them, is yet full of a blind resolve to play the part she has assumed to the bitter end, to save her own name and her father's from dishonour, and to interpose the irrevocable barrier of her marriage vow between herself and Macias. Suddenly they are interrupted by the approach of the Duke and of Fernan Perez. Elvira throws herself between her husband and her lover, and, having captured the sword of Macias, hands it to the Duke. Macias is arrested after a tumultuous scene, and is led away, shaking off Elvira's efforts to save him with bitter contempt, and breaking loose from her with the prophecy that in every joy of the future and every incident of her wedded life, the spectre of his murdered love will rise before her, and 'every echo and every breeze repeat the fatal name, Macias.'