When the old Butler had gone, Ralph fell into a reverie. The effect of hearing all about Evereld had been to make him long very impatiently for the end of their separation. It was true that when she returned to the Mactavishes at Christmas he could write to her without any breach of regulations, but there seemed no chance of their meeting, and he greatly missed his old companion. He began to weave all manner of visions of future success, and to imagine that in an incredibly short space of time he had gained quite a high position at Washington’s theatre, that he met Evereld in society, and that Sir Matthew, who always paid homage to the successful, became quite friendly and cordial to him. How strange it would be to be invited as a distinguished guest to the very house in Queen Anne’s Gate where he had been snubbed and scolded as a boy.
It was with something of a shock that he came back to the prosaic present and found himself merely a super about to go through, for the fiftieth time, the wearisome business which was his allotted share in a play which was likely to run for many months more.
It was just at Christmas that he was confronted by one of those decisions that form the chief difficulty of an actor’s career. To seize the right opportunity of promotion, yet to avoid “Raw haste, half-sister to delay”; to have precisely that right judgment which often determines the success or failure of a life, is hard to all mortals, but hardest to those of the artistic temperament. The temptation to escape from the monotony of his present work came to him through the Professor’s granddaughter.
To little Ivy Grant he had from the very first seemed a full fledged hero. He was the first man she had ever looked up to, for although devoted to her old grandfather it was not easy to respect the Professor. He seemed, to shrewd little Ivy, a very weak old man, and she despised the weak, not understanding at all that habit of making large allowance for human infirmity which grows with the growing years. The old man was a confirmed opium eater. The habit, begun in a time of physical pain and great mental worry, had now bound him fast in its cruel chains, and the kindly benevolence which had struck Ralph at first sight as so strange a contrast with his blameworthy neglect of Ivy’s safety, was all due to the influence of the drug. His will was now not in the least his own, and though he had his moments of exquisite exaltation he had always to pay for them by times of black depression and misery. Under these circumstances the child’s life could hardly be a happy one; she was, moreover, scarcely strong enough for the late hours and the exposure to all sorts of weather which her work entailed, and in spite of her brisk, managing ways she began to crave for something more strong and trustworthy to support her than her grandfather whose simile of the lifeless trunk of the tree kept up by the ivy supporting it, had been singularly near the truth.